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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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http://www.archive.org/details/edinburghrevisitOObone 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



EDINBURGH 

REVISITED ^ ^ sr 

JAMES 'BONE 

WITH LXXV DRAWINGS BY 

HANSLIP FLETCHER 



PHILADELPHIA 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

LONDON: SIDGWICK & JACKSON, LTD. 

MCMXI 



fKt 



n4 






Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &-» Co. 
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 



ro 
A. M. s. 



PREFACE 

The text of this book is the impressions and opinions 
formed during a visit to Edinburgh in 1910 after a 
long stay in the South. Remembering R. L. Stevenson, 
Alexander Smith, and Robert Chambers, and in recent 
years the admirable and intimate works by Mr. John 
Geddie and Miss Rosaline Masson, the writer is aware 
of the audacity of writing a new book about Edinburgh. 
He would urge as his reasons why it should not be 
classed as a volume of the Superfluous Book Library, 
that during many hurried but extensive explorations 
through the interiors of the Old Town buildings, he 
acquired some idea of what relics of elegance and 
harmony really remain in the homes built for the 
Old Edinburgh gentry, and now tenanted by the very 
poor, and of the attitude of the present tenants towards 
these relics — a side of Edinburgh study which, so far 
as he knows, has not been dealt with except by a 
few references in architectural books and in the reports 
of Edinburgh's many charitable societies. An attempt 
has also been made to express and analyse the beauty 

vii 



PREFACE 



and charm of the New Town of the Adams, Hamilton, 
and Playfair, which, after a season of neglect, is 
again becoming the study and delight of lovers of 
architecture. It is said that we may foretaste pos- 
terity in the judgments of our foreign critics ; as a 
Glasgow man (and so detached and alien) the writer 
ventures to identify his opinions with those of 
posterity. 

The scope of the book does not include the 
history and great associations of Edinburgh, save in 
incidental references. 

Thanks and acknowledgements are due to a long 
list of courteous citizens for opportunities to visit 
buildings difficult of access, for helpful information 
and suggestions, for use of books, and for many 
other kindnesses, and more especially to my two 
friendly pilots through the fastnesses of the la7tds^ 
but the writer in the end finds that he has made 
such poor use of it all that he is reluctant to indi- 
cate how worthy and broad are the foundations on 
which he has built so little. 

J. B. 



VIU 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



{collotype) 



Edinburgh from Salisbury Crags [etching) 

The Castle and Mound from the North Bridge 

Edinburgh from Argyle Tower . 

Edinburgh and Corstorphine from the Castle 

Arthur's Seat ...... 

Chapel of the Thistle in Building, 1910 . 

St. Giles' Cathedral 

Heriot's Hospital [collotype) .... 
The Tolbooth— Canongate .... 
Houses in the Old Town .... 
Doorhead and Entrance, 137 Cowgate 

HOLYROOD AND ArTHUR's SeAT FROM CaLTON HiLL 

John Knox's House 

Brodie's Close .... 

Calton Hill ..... 

Scott Monument .... 

Edinburgh from Calton Hill (collotype) 
Register House .... 

The Castle from Princes Street 
New Town and Forth 
French Prisoners'' Side of the Castle 
George Street .... 

St. Andrew's Square 

Scott's House, No. 39 North Castle Street 
Edinburgh from Calton Hill — Another View 
Looking towards Leith from Calton Hill 
Regent Bridge ...... 

Edinburgh from Rest-and-be-Thankful 
The Old Town — a Sketch .... 

Houses in the Lawnmarket 

Princes Street Gardens .... 

Advocates' Close ...... 

The Old Town from East Princes Street Gardens 

The Castle from a Window in George IV. Bridge [collotype) 

Edinburgh from the Fife Coast . 

Bakehouse Close .... 



[collotype) 



[collotype) 



PAGE 

Frontispiece ^ 
\-^ 

To face 4/- 



To foi 



To face 1 4^ 
„ 18- 
19 
21^ 
24 

25 
28^ 

33-" 

37'^ 

39^ 

To face 40-^ 

53- 

To face 56 

n 58 

61^ 
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To face 74'^ 
77/ 

To face 82 -^ 
89^ 
91 
92 

. 96 

To face 98 ' 
„ 100 •" 
102 
IDS' 
b 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Moray House 

Moray House — Interior (collotype). 

The Lawnmarket ... 

High Street and Tron Kirk 

Lady Stair's Close {collotype) 

Chimney-piece, Craig's Close, High Street 

Queen Mary's Bedroom {collotype) . 

Reid's Close ...... 

St. John's Close ..... 

DooRHEAD, House near Castle 

John Knox's House — Interior {collotype) 

DooRHEAD, Bakehouse Close 

Old Town, Salisbury Crags, and Arthur's Seat 

Board-room, Heriot's Hospital {collotype) 

Arms outside Hammermen's Chapel 

Holyrood 

West Bow 

The Old University 

Greyfriars' Churchyard 

Doorhead, Bible-land . 

George Square 

Prince Consort's Room, Holyrood Palace {collotype) 

Statue of Sir Walter Scott in Advocates' Library 

Leith Walk . 

Old Bridge, Leith 

Newhaven Fishwives 

Doorhead, Newhaven . 

Interior of Old Chapel, Cowgate {collotype 

Edinburgh from Inverkeithing . 

Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat . 

The Castle from the Vennel 

The Castle from the Grassmarket 

Parliament House — Interior {collotype) 

Interior, St. John's Masonic Lodge 

Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags from the North Bridge 

Morning Drawing-Room, Holyrood Palace {collotype) 

Edinburgh from the Castle {collotype) . 



PAGE 

[07 
[o8 
:io 

13 

18 

[25 

[26 

131 
^33 

[34 

[40 

[46 
[50 
[52 
[56 

[57 
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[63 
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71 

74 
rye 
[80 
[82 
[86 

[93 

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To face 206 
209 
211 
214 
222 
224 
226 
231 
238 
248 



To face 

To face 
To face 

To face 

To face 

To face 
To face 

To face 
To face 



To face 



To fa 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

PREFACE vii 

CHAP. 

I. THE FACE OF EDINBURGH i 

II. EDINBURGH WINDOWS 90 

III. INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 103 

IV. GRACE O' LIFE 147 

V. GHOSTS 157 

VI. THE PENNY PLAIN WITH A TINT . . .182 

VII. AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER . .191 

VIII. A SATURDAY AFTERNOON 210 

IX. THE MODERN ATHENIAN 221 







THE CASTLE AND MOUND FROM THE NORTH BRIDGE 

EDINBURGH REVISITED 

CHAPTER I 

THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 



Edinburgh is a city from which you look down on 
distant lighthouses and out on green bare hills. Her 
houses are built of a hard grey stone cut at her doors 
with barely a front of brick or painted plaster to 
break her rock-like monotony ; so that in a distant 
first impression you are reminded less of man's handi- 
work than of a re-arrangement of Nature. Natural 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

images crowd in the mind as one remembers Edinburgh. 
Most of her roads rush headlong down-hill like salmon 
rivers. To the east her choppy waves of tenements 
surge out to the hills to recoil, in the backwash of 
St. Leonard's cottages and sheds, from the face of 
Salisbury Crags ; and to the nor'-east she throws 
a long grey wave of terrace round Calton Hill, and 
leaves a jetsam of grey monuments on the summit. 

Walking along Princes Street, you see the gay 
tulip parterres on the garden ridge set against the 
plum bloom which the valley yields to the wrinkled 
face of the great Castle rock, that piles itself up to 
the clouds as from a glen in Skye instead of in the 
main street of a capital city engraved by cable cars. 
As you look up to the Castle, all you see on the 
long neck between the Old Town houses and the 
Castle port is a few small trees and a spiky monument 
or two ; although you know that there are acres of 
houses beyond, you do not see a chimney, and the 
Castle and its approach seem as isolated as if the 
open country lay on the farther side. Farther west 
again, there advance the distant woods of Corstorphine, 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

like Macduff's army marching on the Castle, reminding 
you by their mass of foliage that a poverty of trees 
is a characteristic of the city that contributes to its 
general impression of clean, wind-swept austerity. 

Then, if you turn away to stir your limbs against 
the northern cold, you are made aware of another 
of Edinburgh's characteristics — the great skies that are 
always in your sight. To take leave from a friend 
who walks north from Princes Street is to see him 
impressively walking straight into the clouds, and to 
come up any of the northern streets is to find the 
Castle and the Old Town high before you in the 
sky. " Princes Street is only hauf a street," as another 
Glasgow critic well said, but he might have said it 
too of Queen Street and of many another. Wide 
gardens with small trees and the great sky bending 
overhead is the burden of an impression you receive 
again and again with added pleasure. Nor is it long 
before you succumb to the singular fascination lent 
to all this spaciousness of the New Town by the 
contrasting gaunt perpendicular Gothic of the old. 

Wandering there among the close-set labyrinth 



/ 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of that Stony forest one arrives at many view-points, 
but best of all are those of the Castle walls. Below 
you lies Auld Reekie, blackened and dried, an im- 
mortal herring " smeeked " for hundreds of years 
and cured in the sun till — one may add for those 
who remember their Smollett — all or nearly all her 
famous savours have been carried away on the airs 
of heaven. To the north you behold the whole fall 
of the country behind the golden dome and the spires 
and chimneys of the New Town ; the land spreading 
out in this Pisgah sight, rich with fields, mansions, 
avenues, harbours and ships, the dark floor of the 
Firth, the Fife villages smoking on their plains — 
a distant Kingdom indeed — and the eye draws up 
to the fastnesses of the Ochil and the Lomond Hills 
and the blue pyramid of Largo Law. Sometimes in 
the cold spring days, when the land lies grey before 
you, a pale light suddenly spreads like a meaning over 
the prospect, and distant spires and glinting roofs 
raise their heads, and then as quickly sink back into 
the universal greyness, and all you reap for your 
watching is that a shower begins to break over Kirk- 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

caldy, and that they are stepping new masts (they 
shine vividly) on that barque at Leith. He is king 
for a day who sits thus on his Castle Wall and 
surveys this wide champaign below. Not only from 
the Castle, but from many an office and study window 
you may enjoy these great views. In no other city 
in the kingdom can a man sit thus at his affairs 
and catch Nature busy at her processes over so 
vast a panorama. When rainbows arch him he 
sees clearly in whose field they have their ending, 
and can determine whose by right are their pots 
of gold. 

Hence, a visit after a long absence is one of the 
purest joys of this delectable world. It is good to 
walk again the romantic untroubled streets, to pause 
on the Old Town ridge among its towering, aged 
la?tds of rough stone, and behold through dark and 
furtive closes faerie visions of the Forth lying below, 
cold and shining, and beyond it the pale hills of 
Fife. Edinburgh, as it were, goes to one's head, 
so crowded, vivid and sounding are the impressions 
she breaks about her. A flag is your only simile : 



S»j;vUv. ^ 




THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

like a flag the city cuts clean and brave against 
the clouds, fluttering (over often) in the shake of the 
east wind. She is a thing of history, worn and stained 
with old deeds and great days, starred with burning 
names. Like a flag the sight of her makes the blood 
move at a quick-step. 

Macaulay thought the most beautiful cities in' 
Europe were Oxford, Edinburgh, and Genoa, in the 
order given. Oxford has a prosaic site, and Genoa, 
they say, is a Gadarene city rushing into the sea — not 
enthroned on triple hills like Edinburgh. Luxembourg 
is an historic town with a king's palace set on a steep 
hill, but her pretty streets lack Edinburgh's grimness 
and grand scale, and she is far from the sea. Budapest 
has a precipitate old city and a new one across the 
valley and the advantage of a fine river between, 
but it has no green hills like Arthur's Seat to which 
her citizens can lift their eyes. Bath has hills, and 
her squares and terraces are of the same seemly order 
as Edinburgh's best, but she is set in the saucer of 
her hills. William Cobbett thought that Bristol 
" taking in its heights, and Clifton with its rocks and 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

river, was the finest city in the world, but it is nothing 
to Edinburgh, with its Castle, its hills, its pretty 
little seaport detached from it, its vale of rich land 




ARTHUR'S SEAT 



lying all around, its lofty hills in the background, 
and its view across the Firth." He added, " I think 
little of its streets and its rows of fine houses, though 
all built of stone, and though everything in London 
and Bath is beggary to these. ... I was not dis- 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

appointed, for I expected to find Edinburgh the finest 
city in the Kingdom." And one should add to this 
anthology the shrewd opinion of the rotund author 
of Modern Athens (he is writing in 1829) : "It is 
one of the few large collections of the works of man 
in full accordance with the scene around, and its 
situation may be supposed to have been selected with 
a happy prescience of what art would add and age 
accumulate." 

Since the beginning of New Edinburgh at the 
end of the eighteenth century every extension has 
meant a new point whence the people could admire 
their craggy old city, and such is the dramatic nature 
of the site that the new parts, however commonplace 
they might be in themselves, could not altogether 
fail to cut a picturesque figure in the view from the 
centre. From the Old Town, from the New Town 
of Craig's plan, and from the Newer Edinburgh that 
spreads to the Braid Hills and round Corstorphine, 
the face of Edinburgh is astonishingly fair. Near 
or far it is the same. In the end you come back 
to the salient combination that distinguished " high 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Dunedin " from all but a few great cities in the 
world — you can see it, and it is worth seeing. 

To conclude, there is the one comparison that no 
writer on Edinburgh can afford to omit. 

Travellers have generally agreed that Edinburgh 
has a strong resemblance to Athens, and the inhabit- 
ants have apparently been willing to humour them 
by planting happy adaptations and variations of 
Athenian buildings on prominent places and cutting 
down tall trees. Thus some see the Royal High 
School on Calton Hill as the Temple of Theseus ; 
Dugald Stewart the philosopher and Robert Burns 
the poet are both commemorated by adaptations of 
the choragic monument to Lysicrates ; the observatory 
on Calton Hill is the Temple of the Winds. Most 
pointed of all the resemblances, there stands on the 
top of Calton Hill the Parthenon itself, reduced 
presumably by the onslaught of the Scots weather to 
a peristyle. But Nature's reproductions are even more 
convincing. From the spur of the Pentlands im- 
mediately above Colinton the resemblance of the view 
to that from the bottom of Mount Anchesmus is 



lO 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

said to be undeniable. Bulessus is the Hill of Braid ; 
the Castle Hill is the Acropolis ; Lycabettus joined 
to Areopagus form the Calton Hill ; and the Firth of 
Forth is the ^Egean Sea. Inchkeith is, of course, 
JEgiuci, and the hills of the Peloponnesus rise in Fife. 

Photography — although it has not yet confirmed 
William Blake's discovery that Islington is like the 
New Jerusalem — has confirmed the story of the old 
travellers : Edinburgh is like Athens. But, after all, 
as the east wind often reminds one, the likeness does 
not hold very far, though the face of Edinburgh is 
none the less fair for that. Her complexion at any 
rate is her own, changing with her changeful weather : 
the moist atmosphere giving tenderness and bloom ; the 
sunshine after rain bringing out a hundred delicacies 
from her stone ; the Aaar weaving veils of mysteries 
wherein the sunset, if it breaks through, turns all 
the city amethyst. One of the most singular of her 
beauties can be seen any night in Princes Street when 
the clouds have cleared after a day of galloping rain- 
bursts. The lights of the Old Town and the dark 

buildings, the glimmering pavement, the very stones 

1 1 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of the Streets have an extraordinary definition and 
brilliance ; one is immediately aware of a curious 
exhilarating difference in the look of things. It is 
as though the window of Edinburgh had been cleaned. 

And since we have raised the weather it may be 
as well to deal with it through the mouth of others. 
A minister of the Gospel from the West Coast identified 
Edinburgh as an " east-windy, west-endy city." James 
Payn, who settled there in 1858 as editor of Chambers's 
jfournalj made as much ado about its east wind as 
he did about the Edinburgh Sunday. In vain Robert 
Chambers assured him that the same isothermal band 
passed through Edinburgh and London. 

" I know nothing about isothermal bands," was 
Payn's reply, " but I know that I never saw a four- 
wheeled cab blown upside down in London." 

And perhaps it is as well to leave one's weather 
comments at that. 

ii 

Sanguine strangers, travelling from London by the 

East Coast route past the great fabrics of Peterborough 

12 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 



and York and Durham, have hoped to find the chain 
of cathedrals culminating in a mightier Durham on 
Edinburgh Hill. After 
these grand works of 
the Middle Ages, the 
building whose open 
crown tower just suc- 
ceeds in appearing over 
the jostling tenements 
may seem hopelessly in- 
adequate to the ancient 
capital of a famous 
country and may pro- 
voke remarks about John 
Knox and the mis- 
placed zeal of a so- 
called Reformation. But 
St. Giles to-day is larger 
than it has ever been, and the beautiful addition of the 
Chapel of the Thistle shows that it has not yet ended 
its growth. Mr. Lorimer's building, moreover, shows, 

what is rarely seen elsewhere, that a modern addition 

13 




CHAPEL OF THE THISTLE IN BUILDING, igio 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

to an ancient cathedral may even be an ornament to 
it. The original stone building probably belonged to 
about the same period as Durham, but it was a small 
church, consisting, according to Wilson, of a nave 
and chancel united by a rich Norman chancel arch, 
which together occupied only a portion of the centre 
of the present nave. By the fire and fury of England, 
the " auld enemie," the piety of private donors and 
the zeal of its clergy to adapt the fabric to the needs 
of the growing city, the original building disappeared 
piece by piece until in the eighteenth century the 
only valuable Norman fragment was the north door, 
which a contemporary print shows to have been a re- 
markable piece of work, deeply recessed with rough 
carvings of animals, birds, zig-zags and foliation. At 
the end of the century some one in authority dis- 
covered that if it were pulled down it would save the 
cost of repair — and the cost of repair was speedily 
saved. As it stands to-day the exterior suggests a 
modern building, but the interior presents a singularly 
dignified effect of fourteenth and fifteenth-century 

Gothic. St. Giles did not become a cathedral till 

14 







< 

Q 
W 

< 
U 

w 



^;,/;,CIT-|tV;^^j||j 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Charles 11. sought to establish Episcopacy. All 
through Catholic times it was in the metropolitan see 
of St. Andrews. There is evidence of its existence as 
a parish church in the thirteenth century. James III. 
made it a collegiate church in 1466. 

It must, indeed, be frankly admitted that the 
claims of Edinburgh do not lie in her ancient 
architecture. Scotland unhappily is one of the minor 
countries in a roll-call of the mediaeval architecture 
of Europe. Except Glasgow Cathedral, particularly 
its crypt, there is nothing that cannot be excelled 
elsewhere, and there are only a few small churches 
and some fragments of greater fabrics that the autho- 
rities will admit to the second rank. This poverty 
was part of the price that Scotland paid for her 
independence in the face of her larger and wealthier 
neighbour. For centuries civil life was at the mercy 
of turbulent barons and weak kings, and after Bannock- 
burn the Scots took their architecture intermittently 
from the Continent instead of through England. 
Isolated as part of an island from the chief stream 

of European culture, Scotland was still further cut 

16 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

off from the natural channel for civilization through 
being the end of the island furthest from the 
Continent. Her architecture is consequently full of 
interesting anachronisms and curiosities, a massiveness 
of treatment being given even to the French flam- 
boyant, and the circular archway being used through 
the Middle Ages with the detail of the period. 
Edinburgh's Cathedral is wonderful for its age in 
the sense that a building so late in date should be 
so simple and dignified. If the General Assembly 
had the choosing of it now, they could hardly have 
thought of a style more fitting and helpful to the 
sentiment of Presbyterian worship. 

Holyrood Chapel is a picturesque ruin of various 
dates with some very interesting features, notably the 
sculptured arcade and heads on the west front of 
the tower. The little chapel in the Cowgate, re- 
built in the regency of Mary of Guise, whose arms 
remain within a laurel wreath on one of the very 
few pieces of ancient glass that escaped the hurricane 
of the Reformation, is of antiquarian rather than of 
architectural interest. The tiny Oratory of St. Mar- 

17 c 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

garet in the Castle is the only piece of Norman 
work in Edinburgh, but its interest is mainly senti- 
mental. Holyrood Palace has a small wing of fifteenth- 
century work which dictated the form of the frontage 
when the rest was rebuilt in Charles the Second's 
reign for the residence of his brother. Its interior 
court is a thin and tentative design in what may be 
termed Renaissance in vernacular. George Heriot's 
Hospital, built in Charles the First's reign, demands 
much more attention, although the old story that its 
designer was Inigo Jones has nothing to support it. 
The beautiful board-room is decorated by fine carv- 
ings, very probably by Grinling Gibbons. The great 
hall of the Castle, although largely a restoration, 
has a fine roof and other features, and the Hall of 
the Parliament House, built about the same period 
as Heriot's Hospital, has handsome proportions and 
a fine hammer-beam roof. Canongate Tolbooth is a 
seemly memorial of the " auld alliance " with France ; 
Moray House with its deeply-corbelled balcony and 
fine coved ceilings. Tailor's Hall in the Cowgate, 
the quaintly dreary Canongate Church, and Grey- 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 



friars, with its face like a tombstone, almost exhaust 
the list. Compared with Durham, or Rouen, or 













tiJ^^ 



-1 



■*''»— t/ i^Uu ttf" 



THE TOLBOOTH— CANONGATE 



Treves, or Cologne, Edinburgh as a treasure-house 
of ancient architecture can hardly be said to exist. 

Yet despite the loss of its ports and the destruc- 
tion done by the hammer of the Reformation, the 



19 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



mediaeval effect of Edinburgh is perhaps stronger 
than that of any of these cities. Even now the Old 
Town, in Defoe's words, " presents the effect of one 
vast castle." The tall, close-set buildings on the 
height, pinnacled, towered and peak-gabled, and the 
bold castle at the top rising so sharply from the green 
valley still give the idea of a city on guard against 
wild enemies. The valley gardens that separate the 
New Town from the Old contribute enormously to 
the aesthetic content of the city. They allow you 
to stand back as from a picture, and give the memory 
time to colour the impression with thoughts of 
mediaeval towns in illuminated missals and artists' 
ideal pictures of the towns of chivalry. Castle walls 
and turreted massive buildings rising from a green 
slope — what more can Dr. Syntax ask ? Only one 
thing — a mighty river. We shall see that Edinburgh 
did what she could — much more than would seem 
possible — with the little Water of Leith, as though 
to atone for draining the Nor' Loch, that lay in the 
shadow of the Castle where the railway now runs. 
It was the mirror for Old Edinburgh's beauty into 



20 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 



which through the years she gazed, like the Lady of 

Shalott, until she was half sick of herself and the sun. 

And so at last she destroyed her 

mirror and left her high bower 

and passed over to a fair new 

Camelot. 

Although the Old Town is 
usually mentioned with a sigh for 
what once it was, the pilgrim 
will find when he walks the old 
streets that its aspect from across 
the valley is not an unfaithful 
index to the interior. A good 
deal has gone, and the lovers of 
the Old Town do right to mourn 
the losses and protest against the 
new attempts of those who cannot 
even understand that antiquity 
nowadays pays its own way in the hard cash of visitors 
and the trade that they bring. But much that is 
ancient remains. Mr. Bruce Home has calculated that 




HOUSES IN THE OLD TOWN 



almost a hundred old lands and houses survive in the 



21 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

two thoroughfares between the Castle and Holyrood 
and in the Grassmarket, while some unidentified por- 
tions of old buildings exist under modern masks. It 
is indeed a matter for wonder that so much has been 
preserved through the ages ; when the long-neglected 
scheme of city reform was at last begun, the reformers, 
finding themselves free to make a clearance of the 
horrors and squalors of the Old Town, took little 
thought of what they swept away. Since then the 
citizens, who love their old city and understand the 
magnitude of their trust, have organised themselves 
to withstand the unthinking and even malicious 
efforts of the new destroyers who, with far less 
excuse than the old, seek to do greater damage. 
The buildings that front us to-day are the more 
precious because they seem to be the survivors after 
the grand attack, and one survivor after a battle is 
worth all the slain. 

Within the last ten years light has been let 

into many silent old places, where the wildest wind 

raging in the high chimney-tops hardly stirred the 

I dead papers on the ground. Some closes in the 



22 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

High Street, which were so narrow when they were new 
that men fighting in them could not swing a sword, 
and fought with the point of a dagger, or, if they 
were Highlanders, with the skean-dhu that they carried 
in their garters, have gone at last. In Mr. Home's 
faithful and loving drawings their swart beauty and 
rocky strangeness are happily preserved. Gone, too, is 
the dark descending close that opened opposite the 
Tron Kirk, and took you by sharp stages into a 
teeming butcher's market, full of dark figures and 
dancing shadows among the coloured meats. Gone 
the cranky old shop that was once the home of 
Allan Ramsay, the barber-poet, and was a barber's 
shop again when I leaned one Hogmanay night on 
its outside wooden gallery and watched the white 
grimacing faces of the crowds under the dark la^tds. 
But in the Lawnmarket and the High Street and the 
Canongate long stretches of the ancient wall of 
buildings are intact. If there are fewer coats of 
arms and emblems and mottoes carved over the doors 
in the Old Town — I remember some in the Canon- 
gate that seemed like cries of supplication to the Lord 

23 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



as from a city in plague — there are yet in the old 
rooms themselves handsome signs that men and women 
of degree lived and loved and perhaps danced minuets 

under guttering sconces, and 
at a pause, when the musi- 
cians tuned their fiddles, 
turned white shoulders and 
towering powdered heads to 
those black - barred windows 
to meet the night wind blow- 
ing saltly from the Forth. 
The contrast between the past 
grandeurs and present squalor 
in Edinburgh's ancient lands 
has furnished many a fine 
piece of moralising, and even 
the inch-thick grills that remain in some of the win- 
dows to protect the ancient mansion, where poverty 
now hives in all its meanness, have more than a single 
drop of irony for the passer-by. Further down the 
Canongate one's thoughts take a warmer colour at 

the sight of that squat, crabbed little mass of twisted 

24 




DOORHEAD AND ENTRANCE. 
137 COWGATE 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Stone where Queen Mary, they say, bathed in wine. 
There it stands, apart and preserved, as one might 
keep a battered shell because it had once contained 
a lustrous pearl. 

According to some wise men of the West, Edin- 




HOLYROOD AND ARTHUR'S SEAT FROM CALTON HILL 

burgh is the place that Glasgow folk deserve, but 
there is surely something to be said for a people who 
keep unspoilt at their doors those astounding pieces 
of wild nature, Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags. 
These strange open heights and green spaces give 

25 D 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Edinburgh its rarest effect. You pass down the 
Canongate, with its tall lands and mansions crammed 
with uneasy life, and suddenly the street grows wider 
and a few lower buildings like ancient hostelries bring 
you to the Palace, where kilted sentinels pace to and 
fro. Then past the shelter of its walls and out into 
open naked country without a house in sight, and 
nothing, as it seems, between you and the dangers 
of the night but your own right arm. It must have 
been so in the days of the Jameses. The traveller 
issuing from the protecting city at nightfall, as you 
have done, must here have paused a little, as the gates 
clanged behind him, to look up at the unchanged 
hill and the dark empty country, and to see that his 
weapons were clear before starting his horse at a trot. 
There are cities that retain more of their ancient 
substance than Edinburgh, but only Edinburgh can 
give you so intimate a mediaeval sensation as this. 

The battle has gone hard against ancient buildings 
in other Scots towns. Glasgow has only one piece 
of domestic architecture older than the eighteenth 

century, and Ayr perhaps three ; except Stirling, there 

26 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

is hardly a town in Scotland that can show half-a- 
dozen. Discriminating Edinburgh people may well 
feel pride that so much of their Old Town remains 
to them, but with all admiration for their efforts they 
could have done little to stay the destruction had it 
not been for one thing. The Old Town was preserved 
from the modern destroyer, as she was so often saved 
from her older enemies, by virtue of her precipitous 
position. The main enemies of antiquity in the High 
Streets of our old cities are tramway cars. When 
these appear in the old half-deserted thoroughfares, 
they draw the neighbourhood immediately, and old 
buildings are pulled down to make way for shops on 
the modern scale. Almost the last of the George 
the Third houses in Princes Street is gone, but the 
Canongate has still a great mansion of Queen Mary's 
time, and another in which Cromwell stayed, and 
John Knox's House, and many another ancient building. 
' A great part of the old-world look of the Canongate , 
and Lawnmarket and Cowgate comes from the small ' 
scale of the shops. One is constantly coming to ) 

high-set, gently-curved shop windows with small panes 

27 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of glass and curious arched woodwork, into which 
Scott as a boy may have peered. Where windows 
of the modern size have been inserted, the land loses 
half its height. And the historic High Street itself, 
which, according to the urbane Captain Topham, in 
the eighteenth century far surpassed the Rue Royale 
at Lisle (then said to be the finest street in Europe), 
is too steep and its continuation too crooked for 
car traffic — even if car traffic could lead anywhere, 
which it cannot, since the Castle blocks one end and 
Holyrood the other. 

It seems, indeed, as if the most dangerous period 
had passed, and the Old Town had survived the un- 
sympathetic generations. The salvage work done in 
the face of many difficulties by such practical en- 
thusiasts as Mr. Patrick Geddes and other discrimi- 
nating lovers of the Old Town is extraordinary, 
not only in repairing ancient buildings and making 
students' settlements of them — a true Back to the 
Lands Movement — but also in awakening people to 
the idea of the Old Town's regeneration. Lady 

Stair's House has been preserved by Lord Rosebery. 

28 




JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Mowbray House enjoys the safety of John Knox's 
House, its neighbour, and so the most richly pic- 
turesque corner of the Old Town is guaranteed to 
posterity. There can surely be little fear now of the 
fate of Moray House, or the Tailor's Hall, or of 
White Horse Close, where the Scots lords, assembling 
on their way to join King Charles at Berwick, en- 
countered the Presbyterian mob which had gathered 
to oppose them, so that to all save Montrose, who 
broke through, the affair was '' the Stoppit Stravaig." 
The Earl of Huntly's Speaking House in the 
Canongate, whose three plaster gables you can see 
from the Regent Road, and the Charles the First 
House on Castle Hill are assets too great to remain 
long in jeopardy. For never has there been a time 
when those to whom historical and picturesque things 
are meaningless have been more willing to listen to 
the arguments of others who care for these matters. 
Every day a larger public is enlisted and forces are 
organised with more effect. And yet, rally as the 
best in Edinburgh may to the banner of antiquity, 

when the gong of the tramway car clangs down the 

30 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

High Street, by that token we shall know that the 

knell of the Old Town has sounded at last. 

Enough of Old Edinburgh happily survives to-day 

to make us realise its picturesqueness and puzzle 

over its manner of life in former times. The small- 

ness of the city in which, in the middle of the 

eighteenth century, a multitude of human beings were 

cooped up, is one of your strongest impressions, and 

although the fifteen-story buildings in Parliament Close 

are all gone, many high-piled rookeries remain to 

afford explanations. *' Sic itur ad astra^'' the motto 

on the Canongate Tolbooth, was a poetic reading of 

the outcome. Much has been written about the Old 

Town's picturesque life, when learning, beauty, rank 

and wit touched shoulders on the stair with poverty 

and crime and incredible coarseness. But the habits 

of its modern tenants, and even the revival of the 

flat system in other towns, can give us little help in 

realising what life must have meant in Old Edinburgh 

under the earlier conditions, and, as one burrows 

into the literature and history and law reports of 

the time, the matter for wonder lies not only in 

31 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

the unparalleled intimacy of the town's life but in 
the secrecy that seems to have existed along with it. 
And wonder rises to a monumental height when we 
remember the case of the famous Deacon Brodie, 
Town Councillor and Deacon of the Wrights by 
day and tavern sharper, ruffler and burglar by night. 
Think of the narrowness of the stage on which 
he played his uncanny part. He lived respectably 
with his sister in a house (now destroyed) at the 
foot of a close that falls off the Lawnmarket on the 
south side. The entry through which he sallied by 
day as a worthy and rather dandified town councillor, 
and by night in a grey coat with pistols in his belt 
and a mask in his pocket, still stands dark and 
enigmatic enough in all conscience for the name it 
bears — Brodie's Close. Much of his time he spent in 
Clark's Tavern in Fleshmarket Close, a house which, 
according to one authority, may possibly survive in 
the remnant of the old close that runs between 
High Street and Cockburn Street. And the Tavern, 
by all evidence at the trial, was as disreputable as the 

worst sharpers and blackguards in Edinburgh could 

32 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 



make it. The Edinburgh citizen of that day was 
none too particular where he drank, but Clark's 
Tavern seems to have 
been like a boozing ^ " " 
ken in Seven Dials. 
It was not here that 
the Deacon met his 
daytime acquaint- 
ances, and yet his 
reputation must have 
been in jeopardy 
every time he came 
and went. He had 
two mistresses, each 
of whom was pre- 
sumably unaware of 
the other's existence. 
The one, Anne Grant, 

a letter to whom, written after his escape from 
Scotland, was the cause of his capture, lived in 
Cant's Close and had borne him three children, 

the oldest of whom was fourteen at the time of 

33 E 




BRODIE'S CLOSE 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



his trial. The other, Jean Watt, who had two 
children by him, and attempted to prove an alibi 
for him at the trial, lived in Liberton's Wynd. 
His chief associate. Smith, had a grocer's shop in 
the Cowgate, where on the night of the fatal attack 
on the Excise Office in Chessel's Court he burst in 
upon his anxiously waiting friends in a merry mood, 
pistol in hand, and singing a stave from the Beggar s 
Opera. The position of this shop in the Cowgate 
is not given. The iron crowbar, curling-tongs and 
false key were hidden after the burglary in a hole 
in Allan's Close. Let us see where these places are. 
From the Deacon's house, with its panel painting 
of "The Adoration of the Wise Men," and its large 
uncommon window, to the Lawnmarket entry to 
the Close would be less than a hundred yards ; from 
there to the head of Fleshmarket Close is about 
three hundred yards. Liberton's Wynd was in the 
Lawnmarket, almost at his own door. Cant's Close 
can be seen on the High Street past Niddry Street, 
say a hundred yards from Fleshmarket Close. Allan's 
Close (one of the most gauntly impressive things in 

34 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Edinburgh) is nearly opposite the Market Cross. 
Smith's house in the Cowgate was stated at the trial 
to be a few minutes' walk from Brodie's house. The 
whole itinerary can be made in twenty minutes. 
That a career of such wild duplicity as Brodie's 
could be carried on so long without detection sug- 
gests a field with vast distances and unrelated dis- 
tricts, like London (where in Dr. yekyll and Mr. 
Hyde the Brodie idea was ultimately given a higher 
life) or even a part of London like Battersea or 
Pimlico. But in Old Edinburgh, where more than 
half the people were known to one another by head- 
mark and nickname, it is difficult to bring these 
facts in line with one's idea of reality. His whole 
campaign had no larger field than Lincoln's Inn in 
London, or Gordon Street, Glasgow, with a piece of 
St. Vincent Street of the same length. 

To many a visitor who has prepared himself by 
reading to find in Edinburgh the scene of innumer- 
able incidents in history and romance and to people 
the old streets with a multitude of phantoms, one 
of the sharpest sensations of his visit is this small- 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

ness of the Old Town. Its limited scale, which 
deepens the mystery of Deacon Brodie, deepens yet 
further the darkness that still surrounds the extra- 
ordinary outbreak of the Porteous Riot, which rose 
suddenly by beat of drum in the Grassmarket, did 
what it had come to do and nothing else, then 
vanished into the night as suddenly as it had come. 
The rioters brought water-buckets to extinguish the 
iire after they had burnt down the Tolbooth door, 
and a guinea to pay for a halter in West Bow ; 
they disarmed the Town Guard, held the gates and 
commanded the city under the very guns of the 
Castle ; and in the morning a pile of extinguished 
torches and a dead man hanging from a dyer's 
pole were all the evidence to show that what 
people, startled from their beds, had seen at their 
windows was not an hallucination of the night. And 
all Queen Caroline's lawyers and all the spies in 
Scotland could not bring home the guilt to a single 
man. Old Edinburgh's size intensifies the strangeness 
of this and of many another wild passage in her story. 
The mystery of London lies in its interminable 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

jungles of houses and in its vast areas of divergent 
forms of civilization. One of the most potent appeals 
made to the imagination by Old Edinburgh is the 
narrowness of the stage on which her big effects 
were played. 




in 



Like the daughter of many a famous beauty, the 

New Town of Edinburgh, since she has grown up, has 

37 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

not had justice done to her. A great deal, of course, 
was made of the new baby. Craig's plan was hailed 
as an inspiration, and Provost Drummond, the " onlie 
begetter," was praised with sweet words : — 

" By thee Auld Reekie throve and grew 
Delightfu' to her children's view ; 
Nae mair shall Glasgow's striplings threep 
Their city's beauty and its shape, 
While our new city spreads around 
Her bonny wings on fairy ground." 

Writers and poets acclaimed her early beauties. Cer- 
tainly, nobody gave her a handsome present like the 
Lafayette Memorial which America gave to Paris, or 
Bartholdi's statue of Liberty which a Frenchman gave 
to New York, for that was not the custom of the 
time, but writers of all nations gave her their hand- 
somest eulogy. When Scott was a boy the unfinished 
George Street was " threeped " as the most splendid 
street in Europe and Princes Street as the most elegant 
terrace. Even when his poems and romances had 
turned his generation mad for mediaevalism, there was 

enthusiasm to spare for the New Town which the 

38 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Modern Athens idea brought to a focus. Scott's friend, 
Mrs. Hughes of Uffington, who visited him in 1824, 




SCOTT MONUMENT 



apologises because a passing glance of admiration at 

the New Town had sufficed her. 

Every one had his say about the future of the 

Princess. Cockburn says that " there were more 

schemes and pamphlets and discussions and anxiety 

39 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

about the improvement of our edifices and prospects 
within ten years after the war had ceased (1815) 
than throughout the whole of the preceding century 
and a half." Money had been lavished upon the New 
Town, about two millions being spent in less than 
thirty years. She was so expensive an offspring that 
in 1833 her parent had to come to an arrange- 
ment with her creditors. Some of her most costly 
baubles were stopped in the making. The Parthenon, 
then being built on Calton Hill as a National Memorial 
to commemorate the achievements of the Peninsular 
War, still shows a naked screen of twelve columns 
and the entablature against the sky. Robert Adam's 
new University and Charlotte Square remained to be 
finished in a modified form by other hands many 
years later. The black and yellow chequered floor 
in the hall of the Register House is not the marble 
of Adam's design, but painted wood. 

At that time the young beauty may be said to 
have " come out " under slightly equivocal circum- 
stances, but she believed in her star and grew yearly 

more handsome. The National Gallery was added by 

40 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Playfair to his Royal Institution on the Mound ; a 
region of imposing new terraces and crescents appeared 
in the south-west on the Dean estate ; a noble 
company of bank buildings arose about St. Andrew's 
Square, and the City Council in 1842 ventured bravely 
on another piece of formal town-planning, this time 
for the district between Edinburgh and Leith. Un- 
happily the railway was allowed to have its way, 
and the plan was ruined by a goods station, which 
might have been placed elsewhere without hardship 
to trade. However, the terraces round Calton Hill 
were built, and the planning in the vicinity of the 
hill was saved, but of the three streets planned to 
radiate from the hill with a vista of its terraced height 
only one exists. By a neat piece of irony, Playfair 
Street, which was to perpetuate the name of the 
designer, is the site of the railway yard. After this 
the City Council seems to have become much like 
other city councils, and Edinburgh, which had begun 
so splendidly, was allowed to develop in simple hugger- 
mugger fashion. The district round Holyrood was 
ruined, and hopeless parts, like Dairy and Gorgie, 

41 F 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

sprang up. In the latter half of last century the city 
owed its most striking things to a wonderful succession 
of public-spirited citizens who showered upon her a 
cathedral, a college, a portrait gallery, several schools 
and institutions, and a great hall, and laid out public 
gardens. Few cities have inspired such generous gifts 
from their children, and who can say how great a part 
of this is due to the far-seeing Councils who took 
thought and planned to make their city beautiful, 
worthy of great benefactions? 

Yet it is not a little curious that in the last half- 
century there has been a certain fall in the world's 
appreciation of the New Town. Princes Street has 
been admired, as a matter of course, but one-half of 
Princes Street is really the Old Town. The rare 
beauty of Charlotte Square or the handsome St. 
Andrew's Square or Queen Street and the streets that 
fall away towards the Firth seemed for the time to 
lose interest for the visitors who gave their impressions 
to print, and even the Edinburgh writers have shown 
faint enthusiasm for the New Town. Of course, in 

England and the Continent handsome cities and wings 

42 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

of cities were springing up, and the stately considered 
appearance of the New Edinburgh was not the novelty 
it had been, while Rossetti and Swinburne had given 
the dilettante tourist a new appetite for the romanti- 
cism of the Old Town. One of the few outstanding 
things in Britain designed since Wren's time is Adam's 
Register House, with its fine approach, its perfect 
corner cupolas, and the masterly treatment of the 
surface of its facade. It was built from the moneys 
of the Jacobite estates forfeited in the " Forty- Five," 
and is the finest of the many beautiful things that 
sprang from the misfortune of the Jacobites. It is 
rash for a visitor to generalise on these matters, but 
apart from architects (who certainly form a society 
large enough to permeate the mass of the Edinburgh 
middle-class) he will find even yet a surprising majority 
of persons interested in the arts who have never 
thought of the Register House as a thing of beauty. 
There has even in Edinburgh been talk of destroying 
Charlotte Square ! What a far-seeing thing it would 
be if the National Monuments Commission were given 

power to schedule the fagade of the Register House 

43 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



and at least the north side of Charlotte Square, 
Hamilton's Royal High School^that marvel of harmony 
in site and design — Chambers's Dundas Mansion (now 









mmmwimm 





^<— .w iktu-^ '».<> 



REGISTER HOUSE 



a bank with an added porch), and the two corner 
buildings, with the urns, that group so charmingly with 
it in St. Andrew's Square, and make these most 



44 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

beautiful pieces of architecture in Edinburgh secure 
for all time. But there is the risk of the immediate 
future. The modern awakening to the importance 
of town-planning, however, is arousing also a general 
interest in architecture which the leaders of Edinburgh 
culture may rally to their aid when the forces of 
darkness gather again. 

Edinburgh is becoming once more one of the 
chief attractions for students of modern architecture 
and town-planning, many of whom, I believe, never 
see the Old Town nearer than Princes Street ; and 
among the younger school of London architects, 
whose admiration for Adam is one of the features 
of our new Georgian age, a trip to Edinburgh is 
becoming a necessity. When they go they discover 
more than Adam, and the apparently endless vistas of 
stately crescent, terrace and square, all of beautiful 
mason-work with many refinements of detail, set 
in great spacious streets, have a powerful effect on 
their imagination. Incidentally, some have found in 
New Edinburgh the clue to Mr. Norman Shaw's 

massive treatment of London stone, and there has 

45 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

even been some talk of the Edinburking of Regent 

Street. 

A tailor in the Boulevard des Italiens worked 

for some reason under the sign of " L'' Auld Reekie^'' 

and one of his assistants who started an opposition 

business in a neighbouring street put up as his sign 

" Le Nouveau Auld ReekieT I Students of architecture 

tell me that they find a great deal of " le nouveau 

Auld Reekie " in the New Town. The persistence of 

the bartizan-like stair turret gives a mediaeval air to 

buildings dating from the middle of the nineteenth 

century, and the tremendous thickness of the house 

walls suggests at first sight that the builders were 

still contemplating the possibility of an English army 

giving them to the flames and the citizens returning 

to find the stone-work little the worse for it. I 

was told that in a Princes Street club a passenger 

lift was actually installed in the thickness of the 

wall ! There is something peculiarly Auld Reekie, 

too, in the rounded treatment of the slate-work — 

those likeable little Edinburgh slates ! — on the cheeks 

of the dormer-windows, making an effect like a turret. 

46 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

But nothing can really be more classical than 
the New Town. Many of the monuments and public 
buildings are, as we have seen, " souvenirs " of Greek 
and Roman edifices. One wide street succeeds 
another with Doric or Ionic doorways and great 
ranges of columns and pilasters, and deep, clean-cut 
windows relieved by classic lace - like ironwork. 
The style is used for modern ends with restraint and 
understanding that speak of an established tradition 
working through several generations. The architects 
had the inestimable advantage of designing in a fine 
local stone, and the mason-craft, profiting by the 
tremendous course of building that was forced upon 
it, rose to a remarkable point in workmanship. Look 
closely into the stone in the old part of the New 
Town and you will find that its peculiar quality is 
got by a kind of small ribbed tooling in the facades 
of the houses and by stronger methods in base- 
ments and bridge work. I have heard these differen- 
tiated by an old mason under the delightful terms 
" droven," " stogen," and "scabbled" work. These 

particular refinements in mason-work are hardly now 

47 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

practised, and indeed Craigleith stone is little used, 
partly, I have been told, on account of the expense 
caused by its extreme hardness. Five-sixths of the 
New Town is said to have been built from that 
quarry, and there is even a romantic tradition that 
the seventeenth-century Heriot's School is of Craig- 
leith stone brought to the site by a long line of 
women stretching from the quarry to Lauriston, who 
passed each stone from hand to hand along the 
line. The finest display of the stone and the mason- 
work is Hamilton's Parthenon screen on Calton Hill, 
where some of the blocks are fifteen tons in weight. 
The credit for the beautiful jointing of these monu- 
mental blocks, however, must chiefly be given to 
the architect Cockerell, then fresh from his study of 
the Grecian models, who instructed the Edinburgh 
masons in classic mason-work. 

The long curved fa9ade of Royal Terrace, which 
with Calton Terrace and Regent Terrace runs round 
three parts of Calton Hill, is one of the most im- 
pressive things in Edinburgh. In some of its parts 

there are signs that the tradition of scholarship had 

48 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

waned from the previous generation, but the effect 
of this great assembly of ordered stone decorated by 
three groups of tall columns supporting massive 
pediments on this lofty site is very noble. If the 
interiors lack the refinement in detail of the older 
buildings, they are imposing enough in their marble 
entrance halls and rooms over thirty feet long and 
fifteen feet high. To those who live in the apart- 
ments of this long, high-set palace life must surely 
move to a stately measure. In front are hanging 
gardens, and below lie Leith and the sea. To come 
out of one of these handsome doorways on a summer 
night, to feel the salt breeze coming up from the 
Firth and see the Inchkeith light sparkling far below, 
as you walk this quarter-deck of Edinburgh, must be 
to taste a certain fine essence of life that cannot be 
found elsewhere. Yet, for some reason or other, 
Edinburgh society does not make its abode here, 
although two artists of European fame and sundry 
learned professors have given it a lead. The terrace, 
I am told, was originally built for Leith merchants, 

and has even been called ''Whisky Row" after a 

49 G 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

prosperous form of Leith's industries. The figure of 
a canny Leith merchant watching for his in-coming 
ship is said to be the real presence for the front 
doors of these classical palaces. 

If all the houses in Edinburgh were destroyed its 
classical character could be disclosed by such details 
as the clothes-poles in the back-greens, which in the 
older part (behind York Place, for instance) are of 
a pretty classical form, clearly designed by an architect. 
The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that 
was Rome stare at the visitor from all manner of 
unusual and ingenious places. His mind is turned 
to remembrance of the loftiest expressions of the 
human spirit as well when he goes to his grocer as 
when he visits the Museum. No tradesman seems 
to be permitted to open a shop in the New Town 
unless he is soundly classic in his shop-front. There 
is a beautiful Corinthian grocer near one of the great 
Squares who exercises a strange fascination over those 
who linger at his frontage. I have been told by one 
who has studied the shop for some time that his 

romance of business was something like this. He 

50 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

began in Stockbridge in quite a small way with one Doric 

pilaster. By and by, as things prospered, he thought he 

would make the venture and go up the hill, and so 

one fine morning behold the new shop half-way to 

Princes Street, and — -yes ! — Ionic columns a quarter 

engaged ! Imagine the joy of his wife. Then after 

years of prosperity, and perhaps with a grocer's licence 

in his safe, the last step is faced and taken, and 

we see him to-day at the top of the hill with fluted 

Corinthian columns and a full entablature. May not 

one say that every grocer's boy in Edinburgh carries 

a Corinthian order in his message-basket ? ^ 

New Edinburgh, of course, did not stop with Royal 

Terrace ; rather it began thence a stronger flight, 

uniting the outlying villages with the capital and 

changing the whole face of the country. A good 

deal of the New Town of Craig's plan has been 

rebuilt. It is not proposed here to deal with these 

developments, many of which show that the refined 

taste and scholarship that distinguished the older 

tradition still live in the work of to-day, finding 

handsome expression through the solution of new 

51 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

problems. Such notable pieces of contemporary 
architecture as the M^Ewan Hall and the new 
Roman Catholic Church in Morningside must at 
least be mentioned in any survey, however wayward, 
of modern Edinburgh. 

iv 
Let us turn to the streets and glance a little 
more particularly at what makes the charm of New 
Edinburgh. It is difficult — although it has been 
done — to overpraise Princes Street. It is better than 
the Rue de Rivoli with Montmartre set in the 
Tuileries Gardens, or Piccadilly with Dover Castle 
set in the Green Park. It is better because, for one 
thing, it is on a ridge, and the gardens falling away 
into a pleasant hollow accentuate the scale of the 
Castle rock and add a sort of distance that lends en- 
chantment to the view. Music rises from the gardens, 
the rock re-echoes to the pipes, but the promenader 
in Princes Street sees neither the pipers nor the 
crowd beside them. Not till there is music in these 

gardens on moonlight nights will their full possi- 

52 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 



bilities be known. Some day soon the iron fences 
of the eastern part are to be thrown down and the 
place trusted to the people as in continental towns, 










^^^, 



s.^*! 

c^-. 


















THE CASTLE FROM PRINCES STREET 



where street gardens have long been open all night and 

civilization is certainly not in advance of Edinburgh's. 

The Nor' Loch, which would have rendered the 

53 



r 

EDINBURGH REVISITED 



final touch of romance to this spot, has gone, but I 
am not among those who lament without ceasing the 
railway's presence there. The little volleys of white 
smoke it sends against the hill are not unpicturesque, 
and there is something not at all unfitting in the 
thought of the unending stream of humanity flowing 
swiftly past the unchangeable rock. 

Princes Street has a way of turning everything, 
however obdurate, to favour and to comeliness. Re- 
pairing operations on tramcar lines do not usually 
arouse aesthetic enthusiasm, but the repair of the 
Princes Street lines produces a multitude of fluttering 
little red flags that make a merry sight, and at night the 
fires and flares blazing away against the darkness over 
the long entrenchment are a really memorable thing. 
To the true lover of Edinburgh there is nothing 
difficult, even in the half-smothered subterranean howl 
of the tramway cables, which rises clearly when the 
traffic of the street has died away. I brought myself 
to the point when it seemed to me like Coleridge's 
brook : — 

" That to the quiet streets all night 
Singeth a quiet tune." 
54 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

But what is even the most fervent lover of 
Edinburgh to say about the railway station at the 
east end with its monster hotel ? The satisfaction 
I gathered from this station with its interminable 
choppy waves of glass was received as a child when, 
looking down on its lit roof from an hotel window 
at night, I conceived a pious image of the familiar 
line by which my mind had hitherto been quite 
baffled :— 

" Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea." 

I had even a glimpse of Cherubim and Seraphim with 
their backs to the North Bridge. 

But for the hotel with the huge tower there is 
nothing to be said. Too prosperous for a white 
elephant, not handsome enough for a girafFe, it puts 
the Calton Hill completely out of scale and ruins 
Edinburgh's most delicate piece of architecture — the 
Register House of Robert Adam. Nearly all that 
was gained by the good sense of old Playfair, who 
kept the Royal Institution and the Royal Academy 

of a low elevation so that they lie like graceful classical 

55 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

ornaments on the bosom of the city, is undone by 
this abnormal growth. Neither it nor its predecessors 
had any right to be there. The Town Council of 
1760 never sanctioned buildings on the south side 
of the street, which was, of course, no part of the 
New Town scheme. Bad citizenship, however, ap- 
peared even in Edinburgh, buildings were quickly 
erected, and all the well-considered effort of the 
community was like to be destroyed, when the Town 
succeeded in getting an interdict that stopped the 
mischief, though it was too late to save the part on 
which the hotel now stands. But at this point it is 
always well to turn your eyes from the New Town 
and contemplate the beautiful soaring spire of the 
General Assembly Hall. By some miracle of good 
fortune a Pugin spire arose at the one part where 
an ugly or commonplace thing would have ruined 
the whole silhouette of the Old Town (to say nothing 
of the amazing view of it from the Grassmarket), 
and for this the misfortune of the monster hotel was 
perhaps not too high a price to pay. 

Two churches appear at the western end, placed 

56 



\; .-'■ 



•; ; I 




K 
H 
ei 
O 

[X, 

Q 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

rather oddly side by side, giving a comical resemblance 
to locomotives steaming into the station. St. John's 
Episcopal Church, where the famous Dean Ramsay 
of the Reminiscences preached, is a shrunken St, 
George's Chapel, Windsor. St. Cuthbert's, which is 
nearer the Castle, is the old West Kirk of Edinburgh, 
and its history goes back to the eighth century. 
Cromwell made a barrack of it. In 1745, when 
Prince Charles was in Holyrood and there were 
many armed Highlandmen among the congregation, 
the stout Whig incumbent prayed : "Bless the King. 
Thou knowest what King I mean. As for that young 
man who has come among us to seek an earthly crown, 
we beseech Thee to take him to Thyself and give 
him a crown of glory." The Prince is said to have 
received the story in high good humour. It is a 
well-known story, but it is a pleasant one to think 
about as you pass the church with its long grave- 
yard (where De Quincey sleeps) in the shadow of the 
Castle. The courage of the minister, the apprehension 
of the congregation, the anger and indecision of the 
Jacobites in the crowded old edifice with its multitude 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

of petty galleries, stuck up one above another to the 
very rafters, like so many pigeons' nests — how ever did 
our Scottish Hogarths keep their brushes off such a 
subject ? A companion story of Jacobite daring is 
also worth recalling in Princes Street. When Prince 
Charlie was marching on Edinburgh, a company of 
Cope's panic-stricken dragoons were seen galloping 
along the Lang Dyke (now Princes Street) with one 
gigantic Jacobite in pursuit, and all Edinburgh looked 
on in amaze while the chase went on without pause 
round and up the High Street to Castle Hill, where 
the pursuer left his dagger sticking in the Castle 
gate. In after years the big Jacobite became a satis- 
factory Edinburgh lawyer, and the dagger is still 
treasured by his descendants. 

The buildings on Princes Street are less seen than 
those in any of the big Edinburgh streets, for every 
one walks on the north side, but a number of them 
are worthy of their site. Some care has been shown 
for uniformity in scale, except in the case of a draper 
from my western city, whose building might elsewhere 

be an accomplished and interesting piece of shop 

59 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

architecture, but here is not free from the suspicion 

of bad manners in well-dressed stone. 

Walking along the garden side of the street, the 

visitor should keep his eyes for those astonishing 

I gaps where the side-streets run out of Princes Street 

V. into nothing. The illusion of Edinburgh hanging 

on the edge of the world gives an unending pleasure, 

especially at those streets that have statues just beyond 

the bend where they tilt to the sea. You see the 

statues sharp against the clouds like gods descending. 

It is only Edinburgh that can make an immortal of 

a middling statue. The citizens too on those streets, 

appearing first hat, then head, then bended body, 

seem actually to be advancing out of a hidden sea. 

You feel that away down on the Firth the folk in 

boats look up at you riding in mid-air. 

George Street, with its airy width and reserved 

seemly houses with bright windows, has something of 

the cool elderly charm of a well-kept, old-fashioned, 

t half-deserted library. An undergrowth of wooden 

shop-fronts appears here and there to spoil the clean 

handsome lines of its original buildings, and some 

60 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

of them have been replaced by smartish blocks of 
shops, startlingly out of scale, and by a dark-browed 
Italian building that seems intended to cope with a 
burning sun and blinding light whenever they happen 




GEORGE STREET 



to come to Edinburgh. Many of the houses are 

charming in their simple refined fronts that depend 

for their whole effect on the just proportions of the 

windows and doorways and the neat shadows of 

their projections, with a delicately modelled fanlight 

6i 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

to relieve the severity. There is in many of these 
buildings an elegant northern sobriety, softened by 
a half-reluctant hint of shy grace, that corresponds 
not unfittingly with many of the faces one sees in 
Princes Street. 

The interiors are decorated with the same classic 
taste which sometimes grows a little unruly in the 
privacy of the stair-wells, where trophies of drums 
and trumpets and masks and fans are flourished 
around the walls in tinted plaster relief. There is a 
/ good deal of the brothers Adam's work in these 
houses, some of the marble mantelpieces being very 
richly wrought, reminding one of the mantels in 
Stratford Place in London. St. Andrew's Church 
raises its handsome spire — a debt Edinburgh owes 
to an engineer. Major Andrew Fraser — and on the 
other side, the Assembly Rooms and the Music 
Hall project an arcaded portico over the pavement. 
Blackwood's famous publishing house is another of 
its lions, but the church, music, oratory and letters 
fade before the magnificence of the banks that give 

the over-word to this street. 

62 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

After its site, the Castle, and the antique look of 

the Old Town, perhaps the most impressive thing 

in Edinburgh is its Banks. They are handsomer 

than the greater Pall Mall clubs that are said so to 

astonish fashionable men from Paris and Vienna. 

Lombard Street, with its cheap and dingy buildings, 

seems only a temporary lodging for Mammon ; 

George Street and St. Andrew's Square might be 

his very home. Many of these stately temples are 

crowned with tall stone figures blessing and praising 

him. The British Linen Bank in St. Andrew's Square 

is one of the most highly-wrought Palladian buildings 

of its century with its tremendously decorated cornice 

breaking round its six bold Corinthian columns, each 

surmounted by a lovely gesticulating figure — a 

diverting piece of Piranesian rhetoric in stone. 

The frieze bears rich festoons of flowers and cupids, 

and the figures are singularly effective, the sculptor 

having gauged the elevation boldly and by elongated 

proportion attained the result that naturalistic sculptors/ 

always miss. The figures on another bank in St. 

Andrew's Square and on the Bank of Scotland in 

63 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

St. Giles Street are also worth particular considera- 
tion. Indeed, the architectural sculpture in Edin- 
burgh is a feature as deserving of study as the 
monuments in the streets and on the bridges. 




ST. ANDREW'S SQUARE 



At one end of George Street is St. Andrew's 
Square, with its stately green-courted bank building 
and quiet gardens pinned to the slope of the hill 
by the tall slim Melville Column, without which it 
would surely find itself one fine day in the Firth. At 

the other end is Charlotte Square, certainly the most 

64 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

delightful domestic Square in the world, with its 

intimate greenery and honey-coloured stone and 

elegant sphinxes. The house at each end of the 

north side shows a separate triangular roof which 

gives each sphinx a pyramid for a background — a 

result that suggests a characteristic Adam conceit. 

His design for St. George's Church was altered by 

a later hand, and its corner cupolas, which would 

have increased its resemblance to St. Paul's, were 

left out, but however better the original might have 

been (it would not have been so elongated for one 

thing), St. George's has the stately grace we expect 

from Adam. The test of it is this, that it does not 

offend the rest of the buildings, where Adam curbed 

his profusion of embellishment and wrought out a 

design which for variety, delicacy and warmth of 

emphasis, has never been surpassed in works of its 

kind. The aristocratic genius of the architect lingers 

too in the garden, which is charming with its sweet 

lawns and small leafy trees. Prince Albert on his 

horse rides in the middle of the Square. It is more 

like an enlarged statuette than a statue, but it is after 

65 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

all an Albert Memorial, and Albert Memorials have 
done worse things. 

All the Modern Athenians have been host or 
guest in these houses. It is pleasant to think of 
Lord Cockburn, of the Memoirs^ and his friends, but I 
like to associate the Square rather with little Marjorie 
Fleming, who lived near by at No. i Charlotte Street. 
To those who do not know the Maidie's writings in 
Dr. John Brown's setting, one must add that she was 
a dear friend of Scott and that she died in her ninth 
year. Her letters and poems, although unsuited per- 
haps for the modern golliwog-billikin child, are among 
the most authentic and delightful things in literature. 
She mentions the Square in her first letter : *' There 
are a great many girls in the Square, and they cry 
just like a pig when we are under the painful necessity 
of putting it to death." Such a talent was hers that 
in a verse written when she was only six she found 
the mot juste for Edinburgh : — 

" In a Conspicuous Town she lives 
And to the poor her money gives." 

What legions of Edinburgh children must have played 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

in this old Square since Marjorie Fleming's time ! 
Scott and she must have had many walks in it, for 
Castle Street is close by. The friendship — for it 




SCOTT'S HOUSE, NO. 39 NORTH CASTLE STREET 

was no ordinary relationship of an elder and a pet — 
is one of the most touching and suggestive things 
in Scott's manly life. 

Then there is Queen Street, which has many palaces 

67 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

and wonderful views over the Firth. No one can 
understand the rigours of life in Edinburgh until he 
has seen Queen Street in a snow-storm and felt the 
" on-ding " of the snow hurled over the estuary by 
the north wind. In summer I remember the long 
solemn line of its classical facades against the sunsets, 
with a stray bird chirping in the hanging gardens, 
and a long Edinburgh lorry returning home along 
the wide street with the driver and three friends 
sitting silent and resigned with bent heads and hands 
between their knees. 

Queen Street leads you to Moray Place, which is 
to Charlotte Square what Belgrave is to Berkeley 
Square. It is a heavy father of a place, massive as 
a Raeburn portrait, with a tremendous entablature 
that plays a queer effect in the interior of some of 
the top rooms. My memory of the Place is of a 
house much smaller than it seemed from the street 
and of a fine staircase with spacious landings and 
recesses for " sitting out," suggesting that they were 
designed by a Lord of Session with a number of 

daughters on his hands. On the north side the 

68 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

people must live in the back rooms, which look 

out on the deep ravine of the Water of Leith and 

beyond it away over the Forth to Fife. Out of Moray 

Place you come into coldly elegant pentagons, 

octagons, and crescents and circuses, in which the 

originals of Kay's portraits and the protagonists of 

the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood^ s Magazine 

lived their warm and idiosyncratic lives. Further 

west and you are in Queensferry Street, where there 

was a small cab-proprietor, to whom, as to a 

typical Edinburgh man who knew all his works. Max 

Miiller was taken. He must have been a proper 

preparation for the Dean Bridge, one of the really 

great effects in the town. 

You walk down a spacious regular West-End street 

and suddenly you find that you are on a bridge, 

that the city has fallen to pieces, and that you are 

looking down on a little seventeenth-century village, 

with a mill and a mill-dam and an ancient guildhall 

with carved symbols and holy mottoes, lying a hundred 

feet below you. On the other side you look down 

on a scene that reminds you of the neat sylvan views 

69 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

on the title-page of some old edition of Burns's poems. 
The river winds at the bottom of a valley between 
long swelling green slopes and hanging gardens, and 
beside it winds a path for lovers, and a Doric temple 
overhangs its waters. It is a most uplifting and un- 
expected sight, and when first you see it your hat 
may be blown off your head and whirled into the 
abyss without your stirring a hand to save it. The 
bridge, which is worthy of the wonderful place, is a 
noble design by Telford. 

After this, a pleasant exercise in towncraft is to 
return to Princes Street, walk eastward for a couple 
of hundred yards, then take a northward street and 
try to find the Water of Leith again. You think 
of it as running parallel to Princes Street a short 
distance down, but you will walk and walk and find 
many things but never a hint of water. The New 
Town seems to have palmed it as completely as the 
conjurer palms the white rabbit, and in your memory 
the sight from the Dean Bridge becomes more 
magical than ever. The clue to this illusion is that 

Queensferry Road and the streets near the Dean 

70 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Bridge run off at a tangent from the rectangular 
planning of Craig's part. 

In the course of your search you will find 
Heriot Row, with its quiet genteel houses at the 
bottom of wide gardens, wherein the tenants held 
/eUs chmnpetres under Chinese lanterns in the days 
when Edinburgh did not take itself too severely, and 
you will note how the wide pavement (on which 
you rarely see more than two souls and a Writer 
to the Signet) has recently been made yet wider, 
not necessarily for promenading but as a guarantee 
of gentility. Possibly the extra two feet of pavement 
is an automatic result of an increased number of 
lawyers living in the Row just as in Glasgow every 
additional 10,000 tons of shipping entails an increased 
depth of so many inches in the harbour. One of 
the streets that bisect Heriot Row runs down to 
the astonishingly bold church (with the weak tower) 
of St. Stephen's, which splits the thoroughfare in a 
curiously dramatic way, as though to put an em- 
phatic period to Craig's plan, that there reaches its 

termination. 

71 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

There are scores of stately and curious places 
that call for mention, but one must stop somewhere, 
and that is as good a place as another. I will say 
nothing of Drummond Place with its air of proud 
decay, nor of York Place, douce and silver-dark, 
where Raeburn's studio now stands in a region 
of the " ordained surveyor." (What is an ordained 
surveyor ? Does he have to sign the Solemn League 
and Covenant, and is he ordained, when young, by 
the laying-on of foot-rules ? Anyway, he is pure 
Edinburgh.) Enough it is to say with the poet 
Thomson, the uncle of Craig : — 

" August, around, what public works I see ! 
Lo, stately streets ! lo, squares that court the breeze ! " 



^' Hell," said Byron, " is a city much like London." 
Against that I put it on record that Edinburgh — even 
to its Calton Jail — was considered by the thaumaturgic 
artist, John Martin, good enough to figure in the 
vision of the future that he entitled, I think, " Heaven 

from the S.W." Perhaps we should not marvel 

72 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

unduly, for did not Burns declare on a former occa- 
sion that in Heaven itself he would ask no more than 
just a Highland welcome ! Martin's Edinburgh in 
a west wind and a Highland welcome would be a 
celestial combination far too good for the best of us ; 
the city, as it is, has been loved passing well, east 
wind and all, and love of it has coloured many 
pages and very various temperaments. To take one 
instance, there are odd savours of Edinburgh (always 
with its jail) in surprisingly many of the ideal pictures 
of the type which were popular about the 'Sixties. 
Turner, whose drawing of Edinburgh with High- 
landers dancing to the pipes on Calton Hill, and the 
Jail occupying a good part of the picture, has an 
ethereal echo of the city in one of his ideal Italian 
visions. To be sure, the resemblance between the 
Englishman's ideal of Italy and of heaven — which are 
said to be the same thing — and the city of Edinburgh 
may not mean that the one is derived from the other, 
but rather (as antiquarians say when they have proved 
too much) that both have a common origin which is 

now lost in the mists of antiquity. 

73 K 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

A jail which can hold its own in an ideal synthesis 
is clearly no ordinary House of Correction, and it 
behoves the writer to give it a place here, although 
it is the custom in books about Edinburgh either to 
ignore its existence or to give it a mention not at 
all commensurate with its importance. It is, however, 
true that in the index of one work it figures as "Jail, 
Calton, beautiful situation of." Sometimes strangers 
take it for the Castle, but, je me demande^ is it not 
really the Scott monument ? Elliot, who designed 
it, was a great admirer of Scott, and Scott was 
an admirer of the building. It was built after the 
hay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion had turned 
Britain enthusiastically, even comically, mediaeval. In 
the names of steamboats, in the feudal grandeur of the 
titles lettered in faded paint on the wooden gates of 
little suburban houses in Streatham and Blackheath, 
you may still see the ashes of Scott's earlier fires. 
What is the Calton Jail after all but an architect's 
dream of Branksome Hall put to a practical and, 
certes, very feudal use ? Seen on a gloomy evening, 

its blind bulk gripping the hillside, the mediaeval 

74 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Jail is one of the few deliberate features in the fantastic 
side of Edinburgh which colour so vividly the im- 
pressions of one's first night in the famous city, and 
it sets the proper mood for so much of the rest. 
The formidable mass of the Old Town, peaked and 
gabled and spired with its thousand windows and 
reeking chimneys, and the dark Castle, solitary on its 
shadowy rock, seem to invite thoughts of wild solitary 
expeditions and silent reprisals — the kind of place 
where one can imagine a Prince or a reigning Grand 
Duke stealing down in disguise into the town for 
nocturnal adventures among his subjects in the wynds 
and closes ! You remember with peculiar satisfaction 
the legends of the Gudeman of Ballangeich, and marvel 
that it was really Rvq hundred years ago. 

Then there is the other aspect of Edinburgh's 
fantasy ; the side in which the unexpected and 
the curious appear as the ordinary state of things 
accepted by the stoutest citizen in his everyday 
life, although the stranger finds himself thinking 
that it is all happening in a dream. Every one 

who has had the time to look into Edinburgh life 

75 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

has seen something of it. It is a result of the 
congregation of buildings set on a wild place of hills 
and yawning ravines, where one ought to struggle 
over with Zermatt boots and an alpenstock rather 
than in patent-leather shoes and in motor-buses, and — 
may one say ? — the peculiarities of such a city reflected 
in the life of its sensitive inhabitants. 

There is a quiet little stone terrace of one-storey 
houses, tenanted mostly by doctors and surgeons, which 
you pass on your way from Leith Walk to Royal 
Terrace. For the massiveness of its porticoes and 
the respectability of its tenants it seems oddly small, 
but otherwise it is as sedate as a half-calf quarto. 
You enter these impressive doors and find you are 
really in the attics, and your host will conduct you 
downstairs to the drawing-room, and you may leave 
two or three floors down by a door that opens into 
a quiet back street at the base of Calton Hill ! 
Another thing that the stranger can never forget 
may be seen in August in any of the West End 
crescents. I remember finding myself late one after- 
noon in a stately classical terrace in a spacious 

76 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Street. Not a soul was in sight, and the sunshine 
playing on the great stone buildings with their 
windows gleaming in their deep sockets, and on the 




LOOKING TOWARDS LEITH FROM CALTON HILL 

broad pavement and the empty street, seemed to have 
a voice, as gas sometimes has late at night when one 
is alone in a room. Suddenly I noticed that all the 

doorways in the terrace were boarded up from top 

77 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

to bottom, some with plain deals, others with neatly 
painted green and brown wood. It was quite eerie. 
I felt like Zobeide in the Petrified City, and when 
I came on an old blind man seated all alone reading 
aloud from the Holy Bible (perhaps the sound of my 
footsteps set him to his task), he might have been 
the one man there spared from the Wrath. It was 
as though the plague had been there and the doors 
sealed for all time. To be sure, it was only the 
curious Edinburgh summer custom of leaving the 
houses without a caretaker and protecting the polish 
of the doors by a system of matchwood boarding. 
But all the same it is a weird thing when first you 
see it. 

In these two kinds of fantasy bred by this 
strange place I think you find the nucleus of the 
dream enchantment that Stevenson and Barrie have 
sought to throw over London. Besides the idea of 
the romantic city where a sort of Gudeman o' Marl- 
borough Hoose had nocturnal adventures, Stevenson 
brought in the haar. As Ariel put the glamour on 

Caliban, so he put the haar on London ; its white 

78 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

freakish mystery drifts all through the New Arabian 
Nights. Mr. Barrie in his Edinburgh Eleven 
complained of Stevenson that " the grotesque, the 
uncanny hold his soul." Yet we see that Mr. Barrie, 
too, found in London only the wistful, the whimsical, 
the preposterous : you enter by his attic and go 
downstairs ; you stroll casually to business along the 
edge of a precipice ; you come to a City which has 
no doors. It is as though Edinburgh stimulated and 
satisfied the sense of the fantastic in her imaginative 
citizens, and when they went elsewhere what were 
these dull touns to them until they had invested 
them with an enchanted atmosphere that was all their 
own — and Edinburgh's ? 

In this enchantment of Edinburgh we feel how 
strong is the northern flavour given by the unex- 
pected heights, the chasms, the suddenness of the 
eclipses and prospects of this strangely-poised com- 
position of man's coping on Nature's walls. I think 
that even in the poverty of the trees her most 
salient characteristics are heightened. In London the 

ancient manorial trees were often preserved when 

79 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Bloomsbury and Belgravia were built over, but to 
Edinburgh's loss her old trees were callously cut 
down — Cockburn's Memoirs are full of instances — 
when the New Town was being built and after- 
wards. No trees were planted in Princes Street or 
in George Street, and those in the gardens of the 
squares and crescents seem to have been kept as 
small as possible. The result is that the scale of the 
architecture is notably increased by the undersized 
trees, and although cities of less dignity might cry for 
obscuring foliage, Edinburgh can face the open with 
some confidence and can take pride in her fine 
austerity. 

Then there comes a moment, too, when the 
delicate little trees quietly assert themselves as potent 
factors in the spell of Edinburgh. In a winter 
afternoon at dusk, when the sun has left a tinge of 
red in the west and the waters of the Forth are 6lae 
as a dead man's eye, while night steals in from the 
east, and the sea mists and the town smoke conspire 
to help her — then, citizens on their steep way down 

from the Old Town to their homes in Stockbridge 

80 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

do well to stop at the corner of Queen Street and 
look west. From the hanging gardens the empty 
little trees with their deep - blue limbs rise and 
unite the grey astringent pink of the sky with the 
wan green grass and black earth, while the lemon- 
grey stone of the Heriot Row houses appears at 
the bottom, with perhaps a lit window or two, 
their glow still paled by the twilight, to give a 
hint of home and firesides. At such a time I have 
felt there a sense of fugitive beauty that was almost 
intolerable, something in the blend of intimacy and 
mystery in the scene that seemed to say that the key 
to the secret behind the material face of things lay 
there — there all about one — but that the night was 
coming on, and in a moment more the spell would 
be gone, the faculties would reassert themselves, and 
the soul return to its silence. That spirit of strange 
wounded beauty, of which Watteau among painters had 
the surest vision, lingers somewhere in Edinburgh, and 
these delicate starved little trees among the masonry 
are the magic wands to summon it. 

There are other places where a curious fugitive 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

charm, that exists quite apart from the blithe bravery 
of the New Town or the haunting grimness of the 
Old, may sometimes be surprised. My favourite is 
the little steep crooked street that falls away from 
Waterloo Place, just before you turn up the steps to 
Calton Hill, and plunges obliquely into Leith Walk, 
where the old low road branches off to go under the 
Regent Arch and up into the Old Town. From 
either end this little street seems a blind alley, and 
of the few who happen to notice it, it is a rare 
pilgrim whose curiosity leads him to explore. Behind 
the noises in the front streets a strange quiet seems 
to live on here. 

The little street begins mysteriously, for the single- 
storey building at its upper corner shows a few 
straggling trees that in spring shake their green arms 
over the stonework, as the human prisoners might 
in the Calton Jail over the way. Look a little more 
closely and you can see the heads of a tombstone 
or two. It is a tiny forgotten segment of the old 
Calton graveyard, which was cut in two a hundred 

years ago by the Regent Bridge approach. A pre- 

82 




A~^ A^itAi. ou,t~ 



REGENT BRIDGE 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

sentable piece of it, with a soaring Reformers' Monu- 
ment and a Scottish memorial to Abraham Lincoln 
(usually gay with flags of stars and stripes), and a 
heavy temple in memory of one Robert Burn, who 
was at least a good father, as it was " erected by his 
relict and twelve surviving children," makes a con- 
spicuous appearance across the road. It provides one 
of the most singular effects in Edinburgh's fantasy, 
for a subterranean subsidence has split and cracked 
the massive tombs in the wildest way, the whole 
place suggesting that the dead had stirred in their 
graves at the first scream of the railway below them 
and had settled down again when they found that 
it was not the Last Trump. But of the dead in 
the forgotten segment on the north, no one knows 
anything, and no one can tell how to reach their 
graves, although the little steep street must know, for 
it was once the only way to the graveyard, or for 
a jaunt to Calton Hill for that matter. Both destina- 
tions may explain the few desperate little " refresh- 
ment " shops that cling to the side of the street and 

seem in danger of tumbling backwards into the 

84 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

congeries of deep fore-courts and steep stairs, and 

mouldy gardens with paved paths, and gateways with 

decent pieces of ornamental ironwork worn thin as 

an old fishwife's marriage-ring. The whole place is 

shabby and queer, the houses all at different levels, 

but there is something elegant in the diminutive 

scale of it, and in the traces of a past gentility in 

the ironwork and paved yards, the box borders to 

the little gardens, and the neat flights of steps. 

At one part, a building of some style, with a row 

of dormer windows, is perched up against the Calton 

rock, with an apron of hanging garden in front and 

the queerest arrangement of stone gangways and steep 

stairs that must drive all new tenants — if there ever 

are new tenants — distracted. The Calton rock appears 

through the pavement and seems to shoulder the 

steps and stairs this way and that. A few shabby 

little children play gravely about, shop-keeping on 

the different levels, sometimes on the parapets of the 

stone gangways, or hopping at the game of peever^ 

drawing cabalistic chalk marks on the pavement flags. 

Warders in the prison and lamplighters, they say, live 

85 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

here, and that adds a further touch of mystery to the 
place — those who bring the Hght into the darkness 
of the city and those who keep watch on men shut 
up in solitary cells. Something peculiarly Edinburgh 
hangs about this spot. The living rock everywhere 
and the seemly old house up against the sky, shabby, 
yet with a certain pride and stateliness, the endless 
steps and stairs, the shy little touches of green, the 
air of reticence and inner romance. You feel that 
there must be something worth knowing about a 
house so isolated and fortified. When last I was in 
Edinburgh I was told that Burns's " Clarinda " had 
lived there. 

This is not the only spot of the kind that waits 
for the right seeker in the right mood. St. James's 
Square behind the Register House is to me another 
delightful specimen. There is a melancholy drooping 
hawthorn mourning in the mouldy circular garden 
that is the very soul of the thing. Some of the tall 
hard-faced old tenements that stare dryly down on 
it have known better days. 

Robert Burns, who lodged in No. 30, brought 

86 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

some grand company up its tower staircase, and there 
were many bien tenants. Andrew Geddes, an artist 
whose importance in British art had not yet reached 
its full recognition, lived there, and Mr. Matthew 
Sheriff, upholsterer, who dined with his brother-in-law, 
Deacon Brodie, the night the Deacon robbed the Excise 
Office, and sought to save him by an alibi which turned 
on the time it took a well-dined man to walk from 
Brodie's Close in the Lawnmarket to '' Bunker's Hill," 
as the square was then nicknamed. This nickname 
was unanimously given because the news of the battle 
reached Edinburgh on the day when the first stone 
of its second house was laid, and the two builders 
somehow fell out and fought together before an 
immense assembly of joyful spectators. " Bunker's 
Hill " seems to have been forgotten in the planning 
of the New Town, and its eminence, which with 
proper architectural treatment would have made a 
striking end to a vista, has been lost to the picturesque- 
ness of the city. It remained forgotten until the 
Government Department — which has also intruded 

on the little street at Calton Hill — discovered it as 

87 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

a suitable place for hiding some unmanageable build- 
ings, and then it was forgotten again. Many Edin- 
burgh people have never seen it. No one seems to 
know whether that blackened thorn-tree ever shows 
blossom of red or white in May. Sometimes you 
can see seagulls flying over it, and one morning I 
saw a bluejacket, who had probably tried a short 
cut to Princes Street through some of the partly- 
charted by-ways that straggle off Leith Walk. He 
wandered into the little square and was, as it were, 
brought up all standing by its back-of-beyond look, 
wondering where in the name of Blind Hookey he 
had come to ! The spirit of Blind Hookey dwells 
in many a forgotten little square and place in 
Edinburgh that leads a furtive life of its own apart 
from the thoroughfares and transactions of the city, 
and only a murder or the erection of a crucifix can 
chase him away. 

There are, then, the elegant parallelograms of 
the New Town, well considered and refined in detail, 
formal in arrangement as an Adam's drawing-room ; 
the romantic grimness and towering labyrinths of the 



THE FACE OF EDINBURGH 

Old Town, like a blackened mediaeval hall now used 
for a kitchen and servants' quarters, such as we see 
to-day in some of the great mansions of England ; 
and lastly these forgotten attics turned lumber-room, 
which still have odd little graces of their own, 
and harbour one or two quaint great-grandmotherly 
ornaments well worth rummaging among on a rainy 
day. 




EDINBURGH FROM REST-AND-BE-THANKFUL 



89 



M 



CHAPTER II 

EDINBURGH WINDOWS 

People walking in Princes Street at night, especially 
on early winter nights when a slight mist from the 
valley exaggerates the craggy heights of the Old Town 
and gives its lights a richer glow, its darkness a murky 
grandeur, may sometimes have wondered, as they lifted 
their eyes towards them, what was behind those little 
golden spots that stamp so strange an arabesque across 
the Edinburgh night. The warmly-clad promenaders, 
however, have other business on hand : the challenge 
of eyes, love-making in quiet Scots fashion; marching 
to parties, mounting into quietly-lit clubs where stags' 
heads of many points repel the gaze of the street ; 
grouping at street corners, and toddling off into deep 
taverns in side alleys ; hurrying along to evening 
lectures and classes ; hailing motor cabs and white- 
flanked hansoms and sailing away out into the western 

terraces. But if the Princes Street folk do look up 

90 



EDINBURGH WINDOWS 



to the Old Town dreaming over the valley, the dis- 
position and vagaries ot the lights should arouse specu- 




THE OLD TOWN 

lation in a people naturally gifted with a love for 

exercise of the mind. 

91 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Mystery hangs about these windows. It is not 
only that night confuses and enlarges the lights in 
this locality — a strong lamp in a back wynd coming 







HOUSES IN THE LAWNMARKET 



forward, a curtained light in the front falling back, 
while the edges of gables and towers cut them into 
fantastic shapes — but the whole astonishing spectacle 
of the dark city, with its lit windows rising so starkly 



92 



EDINBURGH WINDOWS 

out of the grass and rocks, reacts like poetry and music 
upon that hinterland of dreams that even the most 
prosaic of us seems to carry in his brain. I remember 
hoWj when visiting Edinburgh as a boy, my first walk 
down the Canongate at night filled me with horrible 
expectation. That long, straggling, unbroken street 
with its thousands of peopled windows — where had 
I seen it before ? It was like a street that I had 
known in my dreams, only there the windows were 
crowded with white faces gibbering down on me and 
there was no way out of it. Captain John Porteous 
must have seen something like that in the glare of 
the torches, as they marched him down the West 
Bow between the towering laizds^ to the Grassmarket, 
to dance in air from a dyer's pole. 

"Up the Lawn-market, 
Down the West Bow, 
Up the lang ladder — 
Down the little tow." 

That was the way of John Porteous, Captain of the 

City Guard. But in the cliff front of Old Edinburgh 

at night one does not identify the phantasmagoria 

93 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of dreams ; rather is it the stufF that dreams are 
made of. The snell air from the east will drive the 
dreamer indoors, but his memory of its glooms and 
heights and strangeness will abide. Edinburgh will 
ever remain a mystery beyond its stones, for mystery 
is the eternal afterglow of ignorance, and ignorance 
is born in every man. 

Let us try to identify the lights as they appear 
from the New Town. The Castle usually shows a 
few square glimmers and one tall oblong shape which 
is, I think, the staircase window of the beautiful 
Queen Anne stone house (one of Edinburgh's archi- 
tectural delights), where the Governor of the Castle 
lodges. Lower down comes the cluster of warm lights 
at Ramsay Lodge and at the Free Church students' 
settlement, where young men, when thinking of the 
next, can enjoy one of the finest views of the present 
world. Then the lights multiply and rise higher and 
become more varied in the congeries of Milne Court 
and James's Court. The domed bulk of the Bank of 
Scotland, sitting high on its vaults like a fat, cross- 
legged idol on its treasure, screens some of the lower 

94 



EDINBURGH WINDOWS 

buildings, but others rise behind it in serried rows up 
to the gables whose crowsteps are like ladders to climb 
the sky. Some are students' halls, a few are work- 
shops, but the great body of the lights are in houses 






.'ijt'jfi 










PRINCES STREET GARDENS 



once built for rich men but now subdivided again 
and again and let to the very poorest. Towards 
the top the lights grow dimmer and rarer. I used to 
try to identify the windows and the closes in which 
they appeared. They invited exploration, like caves 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



seen far up on a mountain side. One thought the 
people behind the lights could not be quite ordinary 

people. Something of a different 
age would linger about them, com- 
municated from the old houses and 
their Alpine life. 

One window in particular used 
to tempt me. It seemed to be in 
one of the tall back lands^ and al- 
though it had no curtain the light 
was always dim and queer. Some 
one trimmed and lit it high up 
there in the dark old town with 
Orion's Belt a little above it. What 
was behind it ? and who was look- 
ing out over the valley at the 
bright-burning shops and hotels of 
Princes Street ? In the cold sharp 
light of morning the Imids seemed 
shrunken and haggard and some of them had returned 
to their modern guise ; the chimney-stacks were no 

longer giant hands clutching the air with thimbled 

96 




ADVOCATES' CLOSE 



EDINBURGH WINDOWS 

fingers, and the thin closes that looked so patchy and 
sinister in their few lights, became more like steep 
back alleys in other cities. My window was gone, I 
could not identify it ; it kept its mystery, and so in 
my memory of it many faces may appear : Deacon 
Brodie in a black mask keeks out for a moment, and 
the light vanishes at the turn of his dark lantern ; the 
brave Doctor Cameron, with blood on his hair, closes 
and opens the shutters again as he signals to his friends 
waiting across the Nor' Loch to convey him to the 
boat that lies at the pier o' Leith — " for all was done 
that man could do and all was done in vain " ; Both- 
well, with a broken sword, is breathing hard and 
cleansing his wound by candlelight, staring at a little 
mirror of polished steel on the wall. Or again, it is the 
white faces of Bell Calvert and her man looking down 
into the close where the Laird of Dalcastle lies stabbed 
by his unnatural brother, and cries, " O, dog of hell, 
it is you ! " while the murderer scrambles off with his 
dreadful Familiar. 

In course of time I made my exploration and came 

to know the people in the lands. Romance and 

97 N 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

odd peculiarities lingered there, of course, as elsewhere 
— more perhaps than elsewhere — but it was all, or 
almost all, of our time. James the Fourth, in order to 
determine the original language of mankind, directed 
that two children should be sent to Inchkeith island 
and brought up by a dumb woman. The conclusion 
of the matter was that " they spak gude Ebrew — puir 
bairnis." Nothing so wonderful happened to the people 
who dwelt in the innumerable caves in these stony cliffs. 
They were gude Edinborie — puir bodies — little different 
from the poor folk in other parts of the town, except 
perhaps stiffer in their joints after their endless stairs. 

" Ye can tell when the tide's oot at Kirkcaldy," 
was the first thing said to me by a woman who showed 
me her dingy garret in Milne's Court, and I found 
that the windows, which gave so much pleasure to 
those who looked up at them, gave even greater 
satisfaction to those who looked out of them. " At 
nicht ye hae Buckie, the Wemyss, and the Fife shore 
to the East Neuk." She was from Fife herself. 
A little old woman, who lived all alone in a stuffy room 
crammed full of ancient furniture, some of which 

would have done credit to the original tenants, told 

98 




W 

Q 

< 
O 

w 
w 

H 

W 
u 

s 

0- 
H 
< 

o 

a: 
fc- 

O 

H 

Q 
J 
O 

w 

H 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

me that it was the lighthouse she liked best, blinking 
away down there in the Firth. It was fine company 
at night. She was a lonely, suspicious old lady and 
none of the neighbours knew her. She " keepit hersel' 
to hersel'," never took part in the clash on the stairs, 
and never had a visitor. Hers would be one of the 
windows that always lit up at night for the people 
in Princes Street, and her wrinkled face would look 
out over our heads to Inchkeith Light on the Firth 
winking up at her with slow jocosity. 

In the life of many of these tenants the view 
played a real part ; it was like a garden to their 
houses, and thought of as something they possessed. 
The Highland soldiers marching in Princes Street, the 
sun shining on the golden dome in Charlotte Square, 
the Fife hills in snow, were to them as the advent of 
flowers in their season. In my visits I always tried 
to lead the talk to this subject ; usually a glance at 
the window would bring a burst of appreciation. " Ye 
wouldna find mony views like that," or " Aye, it's 
worth lookin' at. If it wasna for thae presses and 
yon view, it's somewhere else I wad be — no here." 
One Highland woman in the Canongate, it is true, 

lOO 



EDINBURGH WINDOWS 

told me that though she had been ten years in her 
two-room house, she had never become used to 
working with the washing at the window. It still 
made her that dizzy, looking down from the eighth 
floor. Before she came to Edinburgh she had never 
been further off the ground than she could jump. 
Here the height was awful ! She was one of the few 
exceptions, the others being mainly the better-off 
people who lived in three-room houses, and had 
little tables at the windows with india-rubber plants 
in pots upon them. The world outside, which ap- 
peared so fine and wonderful from these eyries, was 
as another room to most of the dwellers. A soldier's 
wife in that curious Charles the First house in Castle- 
hill, told me that she spent half the day at her window 
(nevertheless, her floor and fireplace and brasswork 
were as bright as any in Edinburgh), and she didn't 
know what she would do when she was moved. 

And, to conclude, it is pleasant to know that 
while the disinherited folk in the Old Town love 
their splendid windows, comfortable people far away 
on the Fife coast count it among their blessings that 
they can see Auld Reekie. A curious instance of 

lOI 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

this appeared a few years ago in the Law Courts, 
when a gentleman on an estate near Dunfermline 
brought an action against his neighbour, whose trees 
were shutting out his view of Edinburgh. He won 
his case, proving that for two hundred years his 
ancestors had had this right of servitude over the 
other estate. One likes to think of this Fifan laird, 
with his taste for the good things of life, watching 
from his lawn in summer the distant city rising in 
its airy grace over the green slopes of Midlothian, 
and of the soldier's wife looking down out of her 
ancient window over the lively streets of the New 
Town and the grey-blue waters of the Firth, glancing 
perhaps towards the woods and the habitation where 
the laird was sitting. 






I02 



CHAPTER III 

INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

If the windows of the tall old town awaken one's 
curiosity in the dwellers there, whose lights so en- 
rich the beauty of the Edinburgh night, there is as 
strong an appeal in the thought of the habitations 
themselves. Like most visitors to Edinburgh, I had 
often gazed up at the lands as I passed through the 
streets and wondered what was inside those curtain- 
less windows, what faced those ungirthed matrons 
and maidens I saw at the windows when they turned 
to attend to their household duties. Where did the 
little white-skulled boys, nursing babies in the dark 
entries under sculptured coats of arms, go when 
they left the entries empty ? Did they go into the 
ordinary hard little cubicle of the poor man's house, 
or was theirs really a romantic dwelling, rich in old 
panelling behind the grime ? did a half-ruined ceiling 

of antique figuring catch the lights of their half- 

103 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

penny dip ? Perhaps the whole domicile was inside 
a lord's chimney-piece — a sight, as Chambers has 
told us, which could be seen after the Great Flitting, 
when the gentry had evacuated the Old Town and 
given up the keys to the Armies of Poverty. 

Every one knows that in these ancient houses 
the great folk of Scotland lived when Edinburgh 
was indeed a capital, and 150 lords and 160 Members 
of Parliament, with their families and followers, were 
crowded into the closes and courts when Parliament 
was sitting. In the early part of the nineteenth 
century, a man who may have spoken with the fathers 
of citizens still living, could remember when the 
Canongate housed 2 dukes, 16 earls, 7 lords and 
7 lords of session, 13 baronets, 3 commanders-in- 
chief, to say nothing of a boarding-school for young 
ladies. Often, when looking at the huddle of non- 
descript furniture that congregates on the pavement 
outside the brokers' shops in that faubourgs I recalled 
how Robert Chambers knew a lady in whose youth 
parties of young people were convened to go to see 

the braw flittings in the Canongate. They would 

104 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

sit for hours at the window of some friend on the 
opposite side of the way, while cart after cart was 




BAKEHOUSE CLOSE 



ladened with magnificence. Chambers, writing in 
the 'twenties, describes the Canongate houses as still 
fit for the residence of a first-class family in all but 



105 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

vicinage and access. One wanted to know if this was 
still the case. It seemed unlikely. 

The first flood of poor tenants had been suc- 
ceeded by tenants still poorer, and a century had 
passed since the great folk left the Old Town. 
Even in Chambers's day the burgh of Canongate had 
become a secluded and meanly-inhabited suburb, ''only 
accessible by ways which were hardly then pervious 
to a lady and gentleman without shocking more of 
the senses than one, besides the difficulty of steering 
one's way through the herds of the idle and the 
wretched who encumbered the street." Could any- 
thing elegant and curious have survived such a sub- 
mersion ? The drunken violence of the Irish navvy 
and the Highland labourer, the carelessness of a 
class driven here and there by gusts of casual 
employment, to whom a house is only a cave for 
the night, and who see a loose carved stairpost or 
painted panel as fuel sent by Providence to man — 
these were not all the factors of destruction. There 
were the many needy proprietors through whose 

hands the buildings have passed, and in recent times 

io6 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 



appeared the scouts of the antique furniture-dealers, 
who, during the Adamic craze, were hunting the 
country for chimney-pieces, and stopped at nothing 
to get a specimen 
from Adam's own 



town. And the hunt 
is still up. Fire has 
harried Edinburgh 
of a few of her 
old buildings, and 
modern changes have 
been paid for by a 
heavy lawing of the 
best. Bailie Mac- 
Morran's house. 




■ !lEIBl inMnW.TTg.T:t^7r'-^llT rj.(tir''iF!Fllt"'7a!IIBlia 



Croft-an-Righ, and 

Moray House (whose moray house 

wonderfully rich coved ceilings are curiously little 

known to the citizens) have been saved, and their 

extraordinary interiors give us a taste of the banquet 

which Old Edinburgh must once have offered to 

those who care for antiquity and beauty. Two 

107 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Other houses are mentioned in modern books as 
possessing interesting features of their patrician past, 
but there are, so far as I could learn, no accessible 
particulars about the rest. Yet people take it for 
granted that within the many old buildings whose 
rough-hewn faces still front the ancient streets and 
wynds, there still are remarkable things to be seen if 
one has time and opportunity to search for them. 

In the course of my explorations — if one may 
use so big a word for so unplanned and cursory a 
business — I saw something of what remains inside 
the old lands^ and from elderly people who had 
been tenants in buildings long since swept away, I 
heard of a good deal more. 

My chief memories of these visits are of darkness, 
grime and strange smells, of a friendly communal 
mode of living, and of hordes and hordes of children 
pattering down great stone stairs in dim light. Of 
long passages leading to inner and still darker stairs 
up which one went endlessly, looking down, perhaps, 
through staircase panes of bottle-end glass on lower 
roofs where grass and moss grew on the crow-steps 

io8 




*Mp\a*( Jf<M 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

of the gables. Of bruising one's hand hammering on 

doors corrugated with age, and thick as the " oaks " 

in an Oxford college, behind which the tenant could 

sit snugly, hearing nothing less than a pistol-shot. 

The doors seemed appropriate to buildings of such 

tremendous massiveness. The houses behind the 

High Street, built on the slope to the south, are like 

castles by the sea, designed to withstand the shattering 

fury of the ocean as well as the onslaughts of man and 

time. The owner of Bishop Bothwell's house in Byres 

Close told me that his workmen had to cut through 

a house wall nearly six feet thick, and most of the 

houses that face the Lawnmarket have a defence of 

four feet of solid stone. The wind had indeed to be 

fierce to vex the thoughts of the dwellers in these 

mighty habitations. There was much silence in the 

very old houses. Sometimes only two or three of the 

floors were occupied ; in a few the la7td stood dark 

and empty, many of the windows broken, and the dust 

inches deep in the ghostly rooms ; the only sound the 

scamper of rats behind the panelling, and even that 

was like a whisper on the soft, thick, sooty dust. 

109 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Every close seemed to have at least one condemned 
house. Once when I was in the attics of an old 




THE LAWNMARKET 



house over a brazier's workshop in Advocates' Close, 
a slate fell through the broken roof as the wind 



no 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

slammed the door behind me. It dropped on the 
sooty floor with hardly a sound ; starting a vision 
of these tall old houses slowly and noiselessly 
dismembering like trees in autumn — of Edinburgh 
waking up one fine morning to find the Old Town 
a ghastly forest of stark gables with the wind blowing 
between. 

Yet the destruction is fairly slow. There is a 
charming old mahogany stair-rail, for instance, in a 
fore-stair in a miserable part of the Cowgate, that has 
lost only a few of its shapely balusters, and in one 
dim old turnpike I came upon a beautiful knocker 
of Adam's period, its very unusual design still apparent 
under the dingy paint. A bacchante's head with 
tossing locks decoratively twined, formed the crown 
of the ring supporting a nice ribbon design enclos- 
ing a little name-plate. One wondered what name 
had been there when the knocker was new and bright. 
It is on a strong door to a flat of Rvg rooms, each 
of which now contains a household. The rooms all 
have good mantels in which the twined thistle and 

rose ornament is prominent. Altogether I saw seven 

I II 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

interesting old knockers, all of them encrusted with 
old paint and grime. In different parts of the town I 
came on pieces of old Scots ironwork, in long spear- 
headed hinges, strengthenings of doors, and several 
antique bolts and staples. 

The staircases were a disappointment to any one 
acquainted with the rich examples of carved consoles 
and spiral balusters still to be found in many of 
the decayed houses in Soho, the Adelphi, Lawrence 
Poultney Hill, and elsewhere in London. The stone 
turnpike stair, so characteristic of Edinburgh, gave no 
opportunity for decoration, a crest, or initials, or a 
godly text over the lintel of the entrance being the 
only suggestion of other thoughts than usefulness. In 
Milne's Court and some of the High Street closes 
below the Tron, where the turnpike has given place 
to stairways of straight flights lit by a rectangular 
double window on every second landing, stand Doric 
columns, now battered, greasy, and loosely articulated 
(like the slimy columns on the Giant's Causeway when 
the tide is out), but still serving as memorials how the 
Renaissance style, first grafted on Regent Moray's 

I 12 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

Gateway in the Castle, then in full flower in " Heriot's 
Wark," came into the ordinary domestic architecture 




M 







^.,A j"K^ i".i,;u^jjL ^1^— i* )t.tU^ ^-0 



HIGH STREET AND TRON KIRK 



of Edinburgh. In Chessel's Court there is a char- 
acteristic stone turnpike, not a newel, with a stone 



113 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

dado rail and a mahogany balustrade, and a very 
spacious landing with windows widely splayed. Had- 
dington House, at the Cowgate end of a Canongate 
close, has a wide ponderous stair with mahogany 
balusters, but to see a characteristic Scots staircase of 
any distinction you have to go outside the city. One 
of the best is in Royston House, near Wardie, a 
very interesting seventeenth-century mansion, now 
the office of a sensible ink manufacturer. 

There is a good reason why the Old Edinburgh 
builders did not trouble to ornament the stairs. 
Except in a very few of the old la7jds^ the turnpike 
stairs are always in semi-darkness. In some of the 
upper parts, where the small windows are encrusted 
with dirt, you cannot see a man until he almost 
touches you, and so you have to make your course 
by dead reckoning and by sound. What it must 
have been in the old days of private feud, when God 
knows who might be waiting quietly for you at the 
stair-turn, a modern brain cannot conceive. Of what 

it was like in the late eighteenth century, Smollett's 

114 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

descriptions give an unsavoury idea. The citizens' 
nerves, like their noses, must have been less assailable 
than ours. Some social philosophers tell us that 
the killer in the abattoir^ with his knife and stained 
blouse and untroubled mind, gives us the best modern 
equivalent to the barons of mediaeval times. It is 
just as likely that a quiet, middle-aged, shuffling 
woman with a shawl over her head, whom I visited 
at the top of a Canongate close, had a great deal 
in common with the gentlewoman of Old Edinburgh, 
who had to pass through a zone of rough tenants 
at the bottom of her stair, and was passed her- 
self by the hardy denizens who lived in the attic 
stories. 

In her stair it was dark at all hours. Many of 
its tenants were tramps and rough folk who smashed in 
the doors of the empty houses and took shelter for 
the night. There were always rows on the stairs, and 
the police were often in and out. Cries and appeals 
and threats were common noises in the darkness. 

Nobody knew who had the next room — at any rate, 

115 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

my elderly tenant didn't, and didn't want to . . . 
bad characters every one. " I meet them often," 
she said, " on the stairs, but I've never seen yin 
o' them. It's aye black dark there — black as the 
Earl o' Hell's waistcoat. But I come and go, late 
and early, and nobody ever put a hand to me." 
She had no fear, but considerable power of descrip- 
tion. Her account of the noises would set most 
people's nerves to jangle ; the incessant abuse and 
taunts and cursing, the scraping and stumbling of 
heavy boots and the blows and panting of com- 
batants — and all this in the darkness, though it was 
bright morning in the street outside. It must have 
seemed as if the incorrigible ghosts of the old build- 
ing were imprisoned in it till its stone and lime should 
be dissolved. 

The evil spirits of to-day, however, need little 
reinforcement from ghosts of Old Edinburgh. They 
are potent enough. An official, who had much to 
do with the Cowgate district, told me how he had 
once talked to a man who had had his ear bitten off 

in a fight, but when he spoke of the bestiality of 

ii6 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 



the being who had done it, to his astonishment the 
victim began to make excuses and to show the inside 
view of the matter. " Aweel ! " he had concluded, 
" when the drink's in ye an' ye're at a fecht, ye 
forget everything, and jest try to get on as best 



ye can." 



It is so difficult to get the inside view of these 
things. A sort of parallel to this is given in a book 
called The Memories of the Somervilles^ of a tulzie 
in 1596, when one Johnson of Westerhall attacked 
his enemy Braid Hugh Somerville of the Writes by 
coming at him " with his sword drawen and with 
the opening of his mouth, crying ' Turn, villane,' he 
cuttes Writes on the hint-head a deep and sore 
wound, the foullest stroak," continues the unprejudiced 
Memories^ " that ever Westerhall was knoune to give, 
acknowledged soe and much regrated afterwards by 
himself." 

Chimney-pieces naturally make a peculiar appeal 

to a northern people. In Scotland for eight months 

of the year the main interest of a room is the fire, 

and attention is focussed on it and its setting. There 

117 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

is, of course, the window, but, despite the splendid 
views from Edinburgh windows, people must always 
have turned most of the time to the fire and left 
the windows rattling at their backs. In many cases 
a compromise seems to have been arranged between 
the two attractions, for it cannot be without signi- 
ficance that only in old Scots architecture do you 
find the fireplace in the middle of the gable with 
a window on either side. Of course, there is also 
a constructional reason for the peculiarity, but 
the fact remains that in this way the Edinburgh 
citizen could at once sit at his fire and look out 
of his window. There are still many panelled little 
rooms in the Old Town with this attraction, and 
their appearance suggests the gift for getting the 
best of both worlds that has often been men- 
tioned as one of the most valuable attributes of 
the Scot. 

But the nights of the long winter would give 
the home its most cherished associations, and these 
would centre round the fireplace. In the domestic 

poetry of the country some of the most affecting 

ii8 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

passages are wrought through the image of a cold 
hearth : — 

" Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold ; 
Lone let it stand now the friends are all departed, 
The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old." 

More perhaps than in any other country do you 

find that in the household of the ordinary citizen 

the chimney-piece is the great embellishment of the 

room. In Craig's Close they are like holy ikons. 

The taste and skill of the old Edinburgh craftsman 

have been exhausted in its service, and it is not 

without significance that the brothers Adam, whose 

designs for interiors led the London fashion in the 

eighteenth century and brought the embellished 

mantelpiece into quite a modest class of house, were 

Edinburgh men. Just as they introduced to London 

the Scots style of assembling a number of habitations 

in one building with a common feature of entablature 

and exterior decoration, as though the whole were 

one great mansion — compare the east side of Fitzroy 

Square or Adelphi Terrace with the range of separate 

dwellings that make up St. James's Square and old 

119 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Curzon Street — so their harmonious and urbane 
mantels soon took the place of the heavily-moulded 
chimney-pieces of the previous generation which did 
not fit well with the pretty hob-grates, designed by 
the Adams and their followers, which were then 
becoming the rage of the period. I soon found 
that the chief feature of the houses in the Old 
Town was the mantelpieces, of which a surprising 
number have survived the vicissitudes to which they 
have been exposed for more than a century. 

Ten years ago there seem to have been three times 
as many, but in the interval the craze for eighteenth- 
century work has set in severely and the landlords 
have disposed of the best, while the old curiosity 
dealers have made captures on their own account. 
It is, of course, pleasant to think that these seemly 
pieces of eighteenth-century design and craftsman- 
ship have been removed to places where they will 
be carefully preserved, but one cannot see without 
regret the passing of such relics from the one place 
where they have significance, and where (as I dis- 
covered) they often give a genuine pleasure to lives 

I20 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

that are stripped very bare. So eager are some of the 
more unscrupulous dealers to acquire these mantel- 
pieces that they deal directly with the tenant, who 
in nearly every case has no right to sell. Many of 
the landlords, moreover, do not appreciate their 
value, and so day by day the mantelpieces disappear. 
In one house I was told by the tenant that she 
had been offered ^8 for hers, but as it was not 
her property she had refused to let the agent cut 
it out. Many tenants, I believe, take the other 
course. 

In the different lands you can trace the various 
stages in the development of the Edinburgh chimney- 
piece from the sixteenth century onwards. Only 
one of the decorated Gothic examples with clustered 
pillars, of which several were known to Sir Daniel 
Wilson, remains in its place. It is in Blackfriars 
Street, in the ancient house with the narrow stair- 
turret, and, over the entrance, a shield supported by 
unicorns, to bear out the story that the wicked Regent 
Morton lived there. In Milne's Court, which was 
a town improvement of 1690, you find the square 

121 Q 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

opening with a simple, deeply-moulded roll of a late 
Gothic character — a moulding which builders used 
in the entries to common stairs until well into the 
eighteenth century — surrounded by a wooden frame 
ornamented with shells and anchors. Most probably 
the wooden frame was placed there at the time the 
brazier was superseded by the hob-grate. One 
stone moulding has a well-carved oak surround, with 
a centre keystone panel showing four cupids bearing 
torches and an offering, which the tenant describes 
as " four weans wi' a coffin." In some rooms, which 
by their stone floors seem to have been kitchens, the 
stone chimney-pieces remain untouched. The next 
step in development was, apparently, the use of an 
inset of marble instead of stone, and many pretty 
pieces of marble can be seen — veined yellow or 
veined green, plain bluish-grey, white and black. 
The insets are usually incised in the shape of panels 
with a centre one on the top like a keystone, and 
long panels forming shoulders and running half-way 
down the jambs, with a pretty little reed round the 
inside. In many cases the marble is encrusted with 

122 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

grime and other foreign substances and is only re- 
cognisable on close scrutiny. 

The wooden mantelpieces display the ingenious 
but rather undisciplined fancy of the old craftsman, 
though here and there a chaste design of the Adam 
family or their disciples strikes a harmonious classical 
note. A few pieces with birds and flowers have 
their counterparts in Charlotte Square, where some 
of the mantels have a naturalistic tendency not usually 
associated with the Adams. A favourite device is the 
twined rose and thistle, indicating an advanced date 
in the eighteenth century, for few Scots builders would 
have had the temerity to remind their clients of the 
" waefu' Union " until well after the " Forty-Five." 
Flying birds, birds in nests, sheaves of corn, carnations, 
vine leaves, fruit in baskets heavily undercut (this is 
common in John Street, which was built about 1768), 
and shells and anchors, are common symbols. In 
Lord Haddington's house, which stands in a close 
between the Canongate and Cowgate, there is a panel, 
elaborately modelled in composition, of a hunter with 

a dog, and a church in the distance, and in a house 

123 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

in New Street is another showing Calton Hill and the 
Nelson Monument, but no Parthenon, these marking 
the final decadence of the tradition, when design 
had vanished in imitative craftsmanship. 

If none of the classical designs are quite master- 
pieces of the Adams, and a great number of them 
have grown corpulent through successive coats of 
grime and paint, there is yet no denying their charm. 
The urn on the corner and centre, connected by 
festoons or ribbons, which also fall down the jambs, 
was a favourite device. The Doric triglyph was used 
a good deal, and medallions, or classical figures, or a 
winged lion, were sometimes introduced. There is 
also a rather pretty criss-cross pattern like a Chinese 
Chippendale conceit. In Craig's Close, which bears 
on the entrance lintel the date 1744, and initials that 
are believed to connect the building with the Constable 
family, are some of the most elaborate interiors in 
all the Old Town la?tds. On the top storey there 
is a large lofty room about twenty-five feet square 
with windows on either side of the elaborate chimney- 
piece, a coved plaster ceiling, heavy wooden cornice, 

124 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

and walls decorated with Ionic pilasters and arches 
in plaster forming a sort of arcade all round it. 




CHIMNEY-PIECE, TOP FLOOR, CRAIG'S CLOSE, HIGH STREET 

The mantel is of marble with an egg and tongue orna- 
ment, and over it is a niche surmounted by a broken 

pediment supported on pilasters heavily decorated 

125 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

with shells and festoons in plaster. In this grand 
room, that must once have been a centre of Old 
Edinburgh gentility, a workman and his wife with 
many children live. Outside the door is a dingy little 
official ticket telling the number of feet of cubic 
space in the room and the number of human beings 
that may safely be housed in it. 

The room immediately below it has an even 
grander chimney-piece, the mantelpiece of bluish-grey 
marble prettily curved with a head carved on the 
keystone, and the overmantel, which is very heavily 
decorated, has a classical head in high relief that the 
la7id Q2S['s> "Lady Craig's head, her that stoppet here," 
and in the broken pediment above, a basket of gorgeous 
plaster flowers bloom eternally, the feature being com- 
pleted by a disdainful classical head projecting from 
the wall at each side and finished with a falling festoon. 
On the other side of the room is a large recess in 
the shape of a shell. Both these rooms are hand- 
somely panelled, and the tenants are decent, kindly 
people, who take a pride in their grand rooms and 

deserve to live in them. 

126 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

Queen Mary, who brought the first glass mirror 
to Scotland — it hangs tarnished and worn now in her 
bedroom in Holyrood — also brought from France 
the first iron dog-grates that superseded the open 
hearth — a fashion which, after three hundred years, 
is back again as the newest thing. The hob-grate, 
with its hospitable shape and happy decoration, ought 
to have arrived with Prince Charlie, but all we know 
is that it was in common use about the middle 
of the eighteenth century. When an improve- 
ment appears in the system of firing it comes with 
a rush, for it means economy as well as novelty, 
and the hob-grate seems at once to have spread over 
Edinburgh, the old fireplaces being altered to suit. 
To-day you will find that the mantelpieces put in at 
the time still stand, or have been replaced within the 
last fifty years by very poor substitutes. Until the 
middle of the nineteenth century little alteration seems 
to have been made in that part of the Old Edinburgh 
houses. A few open grates remain, but the fire-dogs 
have all gone. Old inhabitants told me of the Dutch 

tiles with blue figures, that could be seen in the 

127 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Cannon-ball House in Castlehill, and in Gladstone's 
land in the Lawnmarket, but all have gone now. 
There are still, however, a good number of hob- 
grates, some of the pretty Adam type, in good pre- 
servation. 

Apart from the show-places, very few good ceilings 
have survived. A fragment of Gothic wood-ceiling, 
with carved ribs and a battered pendant, can be seen 
in an inner stair turret (where the tenant keeps her 
coal) in Nisbet of Dirleton's house in the Canongate, 
and there are a few other examples of the kind. 
Bailie MacMorran's old mansion, in a tiny court 
behind the Lawnmarket, where James VI. and his 
Queen were banqueted in 1598, has an elaborate 
ceiling illustrated in MacGibbon and Ross's book, but 
that very interesting building is occupied as a social 
settlement and is already something of a show-place. 

Then, there is the ceiling of Roman Eagle Hall 
in Brodie's Close, now a curiosity-dealer's store where 
old silverware, pewter, court-swords, Venetian glass, 
and a thousand nick-nacks, lie about in indescribable 

confusion, as though the famous Deacon had just dis- 

128 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

appeared after an exceptionally busy week's burgling. 
The ceiling is an excellent piece of plaster-work of 
Charles the First's time. 

A house, entered by an outside stair in the first 
square of Riddle's Court, has a large room with a 
ceiling bearing the date 1678 and a crown with 
thistles and roses, all within a heavily-moulded circle, 
the rest of the ceiling being in compartments show- 
ing the Scots lion rampant^ and the English lion 
statant gardant. This was the residence of a Pro- 
vost of Edinburgh who conveyed the loyal assurance 
of the nation to Charles II. at Breda, and also, what 
was less welcome, the Covenant to be " subscribit 
by his Majestic." Professor Pillans, who occupied 
the Chair of Humanity in Edinburgh University till 
i860, was born and bred in this house, which a 
generation ago contained many panels decorated by 
Norie. These panels have been removed, but the 
room (full of drying clothes at the time of my visit) 
is in good preservation, and provides a home for a 
busy woman and several children, over whose heads 
the plaster lions ramp and tear. A ceiling in Croft- 

129 R 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

an-Righ House, where the gardener of Holyrood 
lives, shows much the same characteristics, and these 
ceihngs, and the fine coved specimens with pendants 
in Moray House, are all believed to have been wrought 
by foreign workmen. Several rough examples of 
early Scots plaster-work can be found in the High 
Street and Lawnmarket, but I came on nothing of 
distinction. 

A fair number of painted panels remain. Castle- 
hill and the Lawnmarket have some that are interesting 
enough in their place but would be valueless else- 
where. One, which shows a warehouse and a crane 
on a quay and shipping in a harbour, might be a 
view of a particularly featureless piece of Leith or 
Hamburg. One wonders why the dead tenant had 
it painted. It was easier to see why another panel 
has the Bass Rock, and a view of yellow hills and 
water. That flat had an iron-studded door to 
protect these treasures, although the rent was only 
two shillings and ninepence a week for each room. 
In a very quaint little house in Reid's Close, with a 

little enclosed garden in front, and a tiny front gable 

130 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 



with a dovecot hole, there is a room with a land- 
scape on nearly every panel, but the work is not 
contemporary with 
the building, and 
suggests that, some- 
time in the early 
nineteenth century, 
an artist had lived 
in the room and 
amused himself by 
painting, quite 
cleverly, a number 
of ideal landscapes. 
The best examples 
are in Chessel's 
Court, where the 
principal suite of 

rooms has fortu- reids close 

nately fallen into the hands of a Church Kindergarten, 
one of the pleasantest centres of civilisation in the 
Canongate. These rooms overlook and open into a 

piece of the old garden, with a wooden bench and a 

131 




EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Stunted old apple-tree, to remind you of the old 

faubourg character of the Canongate. Here there are 

two good landscape panels and a plaster coat of arms 

over the fireplace. Many painted panels survive in 

other parts of the building. The rooms are richly, 

if not too tastefully, decorated with elaborate groups of 

symbols, such as horns of plenty, open books, masques, 

heavy festoons of flowers, shells and scrolls worked 

in plaster on the chimney-pieces and in recesses. 

Most of them are panelled to the ceilings, and 

the interior doorways have carved heads with the 

" cushion " moulding, and a coronet or a symbol 

over the pediment. This is the best preserved and 

most characteristic example of an eighteenth-century 

Edinburgh mansion that I saw in the Old Town. 

It is not clear who built it and how it was originally 

occupied. Of the Chessels themselves evidence is 

found in a document dated 1765. In 1788 it was 

used as the Excise Oflice, and had the honour to be 

burgled by Deacon Brodie and his associates. 

St. John Street, which stood untouched at the 

middle of 191 1, offered a dozen examples where you 

132 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 






ii;,v ■.. 



could study the class of house in which the greater 

gentry of the town settled, when Edinburgh made 

its first organised 

effort to escape 

from the ia?ids. 

These three- 

storey houses, 

many of which 

stillcxist.arehand- <4L •'1^1^ 

somely equipped. A S';'^!^ _,^ .^ 

Lord Monboddo's ; ^5^4 ' 'rl^"^ "^i^ "'M^ 



:i, .^y, 



'•--^T 









u^^m 






V0^ 

■I . ■ 



W^:i 






drawing - room 
has two fluted 
columns support- 
ing a cornice that 
screens ofl the 
back part of the iji^li^'i^^^ 
room. The 
kitchen is im- 
pressively hospitable, with a special fireplace for hot 
plates, and box-beds for guests overtaken by his 

hospitality. These houses have much the same 

n3 




ST. JOHN'S CLOSE 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



features as the still genteel George Square houses, 
which were the next housing experiment, but many 
of the latter have charming refinements of the Adam 
period. 

These rough notes are not likely to be of any 
use to the professional, but to the lay reader they 
may convey an idea of the curious submerged world 
of old gentility and seemliness that lies behind the 
rough-hewn walls of these poverty-stricken lands. 
Many better examples of chimney-pieces, ceiling, 
panelling and carving possibly exist in the parts that 
I did not explore, but from the varied area in which 
I made my visits, I think the pieces mentioned are 
fairly typical of the whole. 




DOORHEAD, HOUSE NEAR CASTLE 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

ii 

Thinking over my experiences, I find it much 
more difficult to say what is typical in the attitude 
of the tenants towards these relics among which they 
spend their lives. As a famous orator asked the 
world on a famous occasion, what did they think of 
it all ? It was not a question that I could very well 
ask, or that the tenants could easily answer. Nowa- 
days, it is generally accepted among directors of art 
galleries that only a small minority in any class really 
care about art. A certain proportion of mankind do 
find their refreshment and solace there, but they are 
not confined to a class. With the poor the number 
must be smallest, lacking as they do possessions to 
stimulate their dormant interest and opportunity to 
identify their pleasures, while if a rich man shows no 
taste for art the chances are that he has no such taste. 
But people are apt to forget that love of art does 
not necessarily go with a liberal education, and that 
it can exist without it. Among the well-to-do, there 

is a general opinion that the poor may be taught to 

'35 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

appreciate things of beauty, but few believe that they 
would by themselves find any first-hand pleasure 
in them. In discussing the probable attitude of 
the tenants in the Old Town towards the relics of 
ancient harmony and fineness that remain in these 
fallen quarters, I found a not uncommon opinion 
that they would not care a button. One elderly 
gentleman said that they didn't care what the room 
was like so long as they could sleep till they were 
sober. 

In the course of my searches through the lands I 
found several instances of wanton destruction and dis- 
figurement through ignorance, and of selling (without 
permission of the landlord) something that should 
never have been torn from its place. But one must 
preserve one's sense of balance. After all, if a 
drunken Highland navvy did smash a beautiful Adamic 
mantelpiece in James's Court, one must remember that 
only some sixty years ago, the learned College of 
Winchester had the precious mediaeval brasses torn 
from the chapel floor, and left to rot in a cellar or 

to disappear without inquiry. And if an orange- 

136 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

woman in Milne's Court painted her marble chimney- 
piece in patriotic colours, did not George the Fourth 
sell the Chippendale furniture at Windsor to replace 
it with examples of nineteenth-century Gothic ; and 
have not gentlemen, prosperous enough to live in 
Charlotte Square, deformed their houses with ex- 
crescences that ruin their proportions, and so worked 
destruction on one of the most delightful things 
in Europe ? Barbarities, I found, were not want- 
ing in the lands ; an old seascape on a panel had 
nails driven into it, on which foolish little brass 
ornaments were hung ; a finely-carved mantelpiece had 
been cut up to give space for a drying apparatus ; 
a lofty cupboard (like those in the Stuart house in 
Essex Court, Middle Temple) with arched key- 
stone top and handsome carved shelves, had been 
deformed into a coal-cellar. Many seemly Georgian 
interior fanlights had been broken and atrociously 
repaired, and one of the few remaining seventeenth- 
century plaster ceilings had been mutilated. Yet 
these seemed but little insults to Apollo when one 

remembered that, save for the combined opposition 

137 s 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of London architects, the London County Council 
would have destroyed that lovely piece of eighteenth- 
century proportion and detail, the Church of St. Mary- 
le-Strand, and that in Edinburgh's great era of culture 
the beautiful Norman gateway of St. Giles had been 
broken up to save the cost of repair ! In no case 
did I find that any of the figures of the old chim- 
ney-pieces or panels had been insulted in a com- 
mon way or by other attempt at gutter-humour. 
Whatever wrong had been done, was done through 
ignorance or a mistaken idea about decoration, as 
when Union Jacks had been painted on classical 
urns. 

A tall, bony, middle-aged woman, with tight, 
greyish hair and a lean, eager face, who seemed 
trained and stripped for her fight with poverty, and 
unlikely to have a thought to give between the rounds 
to the things in the arena where she was fighting to 
a finish, became beautiful in her animation and in 
the gestures of her lean arms, as she tried to tell 
me about the glories of her old house in Carruthers' 

Close. " Talk about chimney-pieces," she cried ; 

138 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

" it was the nicest, sweetest thing ever ye saw : lovely 

bunches o' grapes, a' carved like real, and fruit in 

baskets and floo'ers a' growin' aboot. Oh my, it 

was a bonny place to be in ! And the ceiling was 

a' floo'ered — raised floo'ers — a' standin' oot. It was 

sae high ye had to stand on a chair wi' a cloth 

on a brush to clean it. It belangt to a lord at ae 

time — Lord Elphinstone. Noo it's awa' and there'll 

never be anither like it. Ye should hae seen it at 

nicht when the room was red up an' the fire shinin' 

on the floo'ers and grapes ! I used to buy beeswax 

for the mantel, and aye spent a guid twa hours on 

it on Saturday daein' it up. It was bonny — bonny 

to be in a hoose like that. It was that." 

On the faces of a few of the other women in 

the Imids^ the same look came when they talked 

about the decorations of their houses or of their 

former homes, but none were so lyrical as this woman. 

She was not merely telling me of these things ; she 

was trying to make me feel how fine they had been 

to her. Yet her face looked as though it had known 

hunger, and her present house had nothing one would 

139 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

call comfort. It was bare as it was clean. With her 
and one or two others, the pleasure they had told 
me of impressed me as being distinctly the same 
kind of pure pleasure that a picture-lover has before 
a masterpiece in the National Gallery. It seemed 
to have nothing to do with possession. She lamented 
the loss of her beautiful room as one might lament 
the departure of the Lansdowne Rembrandt. With a 
very much larger class their pleasure in the elegant 
relics that remained in their houses was, of course, 
chiefly the satisfaction of possessing an uncommon 
thing ; in short, the ordinary pleasure of the art- 
collector. 

In some of the lands I found a general pride 
(not always justified) among all the denizens of the 
stair in the decorations of a particular house, and 
they would enthusiastically recommend a visit, and 
even accompany me, the mob increasing at every 
floor until the door was reached, and sometimes if 
the tenant in question urged a more than adequate 
reason why the visit should be postponed, the stair 

brushed it aside, and somehow I found myself in the 

140 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

middle of the room long before my manners. It 

ought to be added that the popularity of my cieerone 

accounted lor this warm intercession on our behalf, 

but there was no mistaking the common pride in 

certain mantelpieces, alcoves, panels and ceilings. 

To live with them, although it had such penalties 

as intrusions of neighbours and their friends, certainly 

conferred distinction. 

Sometimes the tenant had, besides possession, the 

pleasure of discovery. The wife of a sweep in a land 

behind the High Street told me, with many details, 

how the mantelpiece I admired so much had been 

summoned by her husband out of a shapeless clod 

of paint and dirt. She was very proud of him and 

of it. ^' It was funny," she said, '' the way it cam' 

about, for naebody had ever ta'en it into their heid 

that there was a beautiful carved piece o' wark there 

like thon. He was sittin' at the fire ae nicht cuttin' 

his tobacco wi' 's knife, and something — he doesna 

ken himsel' what it was — but it attrakit him, and 

he began to pike awa' wi' 's knife that he was 

cuttin' the tobacco wi'. You wouldna hae ken't 

141 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

the mantel then. It was a' cloggit up wi' paint and 
varnish and dirt and stuff, and it was flat as a board 
— naebody would hae ken't there was a bit o' wark 
on't. Weel, here's him pykin' awa' and pykin' awa', 
and says he, ' What's this ? ' An' if he hadna pykit 
oot that bird ! There it was wi' its wings fleein', 
and the rest o' the mantel jist black — black, and 
naething to be seen. Eh, wi' that he yokit tae't, 
and he howkit awa', an' he cam' to the nest wi' th' 
ither yin in't — here 't is — an' then the floo'ers, and 
then we was aye wond'rin' what was comin' next. 
He couldna hae been mair careful, no if it had been 
the ' Lord Provost's lum,' says he." She told me, 
too, how he had stoppet in at nights and had went 
on at the howking with his tobacco-knife, how a 
neighbour who was a painter had telled him about 
burning off the old material, and how after the burn- 
ing he had rubbed it with beeswax till it was just 
awful nice. And nice indeed it was, with its elegant 
urns at the corners and twined rose and thistle on 

the jambs. And so the sweep and his wife, high up 

142 



I X r K R I () RS \\M TH F I GVR RS 

111 tlic [UUiciiC /ii/i\/\ hail |)ll^^lK\l tlicir discoveries aiul 
loiiiul iiiulcr the conmioii hhicklcaclci,! crust the cjiiaiiU 
conceits of tlu' old Jesi<riier, the siii^n ol the i^olitc 
life of the I'cliiihurL^h of the eighteenth ccntiirs', 
when the Ro>e and the ihistle had l)een joined 
together. 

'Idiis was not an isolatetl instance. Many times 
I loiiiul that \\ hen a tenant of su[)erior taste and 
activity liad cleared awa\' the thick tleposit of \ears 
and revealed an interesting ornament, the whole Af/!{/ 
had gradually awakened to the idea that such treasures 
miirht stand hitlden in their own dwellincrs, and so 
iiad taken with some purpose to cleaning and ^crajiing. 
Many of the tenants luni been rewarded In' finding 
oransie and i{reen-veinetl marble insets beneath loads 
of paint and blacklead, aiul had made sonu- capital 
pieces of restoration. But, natiiralU' enough, the 
restorations \v'ere not always happ\ . I he tenant 
who had enriched hu iiexs'l \ -reclaimed mantelpiece- 
by puking out the- design (jf a dolphm and shelU 
and festoon^, in blue, green and \cllow, ( crtamK laul 

'4.} 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

himself open to the reproach that he had misinter- 
preted the conception of the old designer — still, that 
is the common fate of restorers. Certainly Sir Gilbert 
Scott did not escape it. 

But, after all, the most vivid impressions I retain 
of these strange old places are of interiors without 
figures. Here is a memory that often comes back 
to me. The landlady of a temperance hotel, 
whose little outside stair and shallow bow-windows 
front the High Street — an inn which in other 
days had welcomed many a traveller by the London 
coach with a noggin of something very hot — 
showed me an old property behind her establish- 
ment that she had just bought. We mounted the 
dark turnpike of five flights, and came to a door, 
hastily put together and secured in place of the 
battered piece of oak which lay behind it. Bad 
characters, it seemed, had broken in. The flat had 
been of some pretensions once, for though the rooms 
were small, the two largest, I noticed, were con- 
nected by an ornamental wooden arch on Ionic 

144 



INTERIORS WITH FIGURES 

columns. A few walls of neat panelling remained, 
and one fireplace, which was of stone carved with 
the pleasant Scots roll moulding, had defied the worst 
that chance tenants could do. We could trace the 
old stone-flagged kitchen, the corridor, which in 
itself had recently housed a family, the bedrooms 
and the livino: rooms. Indescribable rubbish was 
collected on some of the floors, and the ceilings 
had been broken. A bottle with candle grease about 
it, and a child's torn shoe, and a couple of hairpins 
fastening a swathe of wall-paper, were all the visible 
signs of habitation that remained. In the pallid light 
that filtered through the small dingy window-panes, 
the place had a look that was almost horrible. It 
was like a desecrated grave — the coldness and shadows 
and corruption, the impregnable stones, and the grey 
light stealing in like a thief through the deep window 
bays, fingering the shattered chimney-piece, linger- 
ing in the many-membered cornice, and stamping the 
grey squares of the windows on the dusty floor. 
Historic castles and great mansions fallen to ruin are 

145 T 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

sad with memories of irremediable deeds and the 
vanity of human grandeurs ; but in the intimacy of 
these small empty rooms, once so crowded with 
seemly and hearty life, now cold and rifled and de- 
graded, there was something that struck a chill to 
the heart. 




DOORHEAD, BAKEHOUSE CLOSE 



146 



CHAPTER IV 

GRACE O" LIFE 

" Aye, I know what you mean — Grace o' Life 
and that sort o' thing. No — no — we don't go in 
for grace o' life in Petcrdeen." 

It was the close of a dreary argument — heaven 
knows how it started— and we had reached at last 
a point and a declaration. In this world, and 
more particularly in Peterdeen, man lived by bread 
alone and the hope of something better in the next, 
and had no time to be bothered with fancy 
work that he would be best without, although there 
might be some folk who had nothing better to do. 
My friend believed in things in their right place : 
money in the bank, pictures in picture-galleries, and 
common sense in all things. 

The argument was a long time ago, but his phrase 

about grace o' life often came back to me in the 

course of my wanderings in the old lands. Here, 

'47 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

surely, was a place where there was no room for it. 
Was it possible that any of the things that made this 
grace, still lingering in these decayed houses, could 
mean something to the hearts of the slum folk who 
lived in them in our days ? I have given a few instances 
of the relics that still survive, and how some of them 
do excite a share of the pleasure which they brought 
to the original owner, as an essence may remain for 
others in an old cracked rose-bowl lying in an ash- 
heap. There was one place especially where life, 
bruised and starved though it seemed, still put forth a 
grace and a fragrance. 

It was in an old house, entered by an outside 
stair in the wing of a building built of rough stone 
with dressings round the windows and doorways. 
The building stood at the foot of a lean dingy 
court, which added to its isolated and forgotten ap- 
pearance, as one had time to feel its influence in the 
approach through the street archway, down the court 
and through the thin little iron-arched gate in the 
broken and neglected palisadoes which still showed 
a few elegant iron urns on the tall rusted posts. The 



GRACE O' LIFE 



iron rail on the outside stair had lost some of its 

supports, and the hard stone steps were worn to the 

shape of a cow's back by the footsteps of generations 

dead and gone. The whole building had been a 

grandee's mansion in its early days, and his arms could 

still be seen in one of the chimney-pieces in a room 

in the centre part. It had never been an imposing 

or beautiful piece of architecture, but even now it 

had a look of old-fashioned Scots pride and solid 

gentrice. 

The room I visited was on the second floor. It 

was lofty and of fair size, with two tall windows that 

gave a view of Salisbury Crags on which the winter 

sun was sending its last rays. The walls were 

panelled to the roof in dark, solid style, and the 

architraves of the door and heavy wooden shutters 

had a carved beading. The mantelpiece was of dark 

oak, carved in a massive pattern in which a sheaf 

of laurel leaves was prominent. Above it was a deep 

frame enclosing a plaster panel, about four feet high 

by three feet broad, on which a grandiose Renaissance 

scene was painted. It was a scene of mellow ruin : 

149 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

through a tangled foreground, where ivy trailed about 
a great stone urn, one emerged upon a spacious marble 
pavement with half-ruinous classic buildings of some 
magnificence grouped round it, and this led to a 




OLD TOWN, SALISBURY CRAGS, AND ARTHUR'S SEAT 

shore from which boats were putting ofF to an island 
with a castle, all in a golden sunset. A galley with 
sails furled lay at the island. There were several 
figures in the scene. In the foreground were two 

debonair gentlemen with long necks and small heads 

150 



GRACE O' LIFE 



and graceful legs. Their bright troubadour costumes 
were faded, but their gallant air remained. 

The room itself was the habitation of one family. 
The head of the house, an elderly brewer's drayman, 
lay in a bed that occupied a fair part of it. He 
was suffering from an injury to his leg. The wife, 
a comfortable, quiet sort of woman, not obsessed by 
her troubles and work, had kept the home as clean 
and tidy as practicable, but its aspect was dejected 
and poor. Two children, one with bare feet, played 
on the floor. It was growing dark. As I looked 
at the picture she said, '' Ye should have come earlier 
if ye wanted to see the picture. Ye're ower late for 
it now." " What is the right time for it ? " " A 
quarter to three," she replied at once, " for it gets 
the sun just nice by the side o' the building." I 
pricked my ears. Could any collector amongst us, 
I wonder, tell to a quarter of an hour when his 
favourite picture would be in its best light ? She 
pointed out its beauties. *' Ye can see the ivy hanging 
ower the vaus just awful bonny-like. Thae stancs lying 
down there mak' ye think o' auld Edinburic Castle 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

stanes fallen doun." She said they were " a' very 
ta'en up wi' the picture." He (her husband) liked 
to look at it, and she had moved his bed that he 
could see it when he wanted without moving his head. 
'^ I whiles stand an' look at it mysel' when I'm reddin' 
things up, and I've seen us talkin' aboot thae men 
and what they're efter." She pointed to the two 
debonair gentlemen, with their backs to the dejected 
room of the poor Scots family, mounting the glimmer- 
ing marble steps to move through the palace with 
the broken arch, and out by boat to the golden island 
with the castle in the bay. " The bairns are gey 
ta'en wi' it, too. I've catched them sitting by the 
fire at night makin' up stories aboot thae men." 
" What sort of stories ? " " Oh, just a' havers like. 
I heard the wee yin saying that that yin wi' the 
lang legs was Wullie Wallace. But they'll no let 
me hear them, and 'deed I dinna gie much heid to 
what they say, but whiles they go on talkin' and talkin' 
aboot them and the rest o't till I send them aff to 

their bed." 

152 



A 



GRACE O' LIFE 



What did the little Seots bairns, crowded together 
by the fire in the murky curtainless room in the old 
grandee's house, tell to one another about the Italian 
gallants strutting in the ancient panel overhead in 
the flickering light ? Whatever it was it would be 
true romance. Perhaps Hans Christian Andersen or 
Robert Louis Stevenson, who were children to the 
end, could have imagined its colour and simplicity. 

Possibly the panel itself was a weak afiriir by Old 
Norie, after a forgotten Pannini, or some other artist 
of the late Roman school, but my impression is that 
it was better in its way than the Nories in the high- 
perched City Museum. My visit, of course, was 
only for a few minutes. One could not trespass 
further on the kindness of a woman with a sick 
husband and restless children. Moreover, I was 
overlooking her whole house — drawing-room, parlour, 
bedroom, kitchen, storeroom and hall — and what 
woman of any class would like a stranger to do that 
on a minute's notice ? 1 he extraordinary patience of 

all the people of the Lnids with :i wandering and 

153 " 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

inquisitive topographer I can never forget. These 
people had inhabited that room for twenty years 
(and in that time one person had come to see the 
picture), and the woman never wanted to leave it. 
The picture, which seemed to mean so much to 
them, had not always been appreciated by the tenant. 
It was blemished by a large dirt-mark in the glowing 
Italian sky over the island. A former tenant had 
slashed a dirty household brush across it in a tantrum 
because the factor had turned her into the street. 
That was for remembrance. 

And so some echo of the grace o' life dwelt in 
the old lord's room with the drayman and his house- 
hold. I wonder if this golden panel meant more to 
the founder of the house who gave the builder his 
plans and watched the cunning artificers at work — 
the carvers, the plasterers, and perhaps the artist 
himself, for the painting is on plaster — and when it 
was all finished, walked through his handsome rooms, 
and probably gave a house-warming to his friends, 

who would come in coaches with outriders and in 

154 



GRACE O' LIFE 



sedan-chairs. Possibly the men would gather here, 
for they say it was the library. Their coats of claret 
silk, or blue English broadcloth, or plum-coloured 
Genoa velvet, lace ruffles, swords and silver snufi^- 
boxes and their powdered wigs, would have looked 
appropriate beside the rich and formal carving in the 
old room. As they passed the joke from Parliament 
House and criticised the new music at St. Cecilia's 
Hall, their attention would be directed by the founder 
to the painting, and they would admire its bright, 
new colours, and recall how Allan Ramsay was now 
the King's painter, and my Lord Bute was ruling in 
London, and the health of the new house would be 
drunk in canary, and perhaps a blessing asked on it. 

And now all the culture and learning and traditions 
of which the old house was a pleasant flower, have 
passed away out of the Old Town, and the guardians 
of its fallen grandeurs are the very poor. The sick 
drayman on his bed liked the picture to be there , 
his busy, courageous wife stopped to look at it some- 
times, although she had known it for twenty years ; 

»55 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

the barefooted children made up stories about it. 
I think that Old Norie, or whoever painted it, if he 
ever looks down from the shades, must feel a very 
proud man, and surely also the astonished old grandee 
will not feel sorry. 




HL that hath t'lrit VPON the PUORE LCNOtTH UMT-0 
The lord and the lord will RtCOMPtlvce HIM THAT 
WHICH HE HUTH CIUE.H PW-lf VtRSXVM^ 



ARMS OUTSIDE HAMMERMEN'S CHAPEL 



156 




HOLYROOD 



CHAPTER V 

GHOSTS 

Even a slight acquaintance with Edinburgh and her 
history will reveal how circumstances without and 
within have fertilised the mind of Old Town dwellers, 
so that above all other citizens they have produced 
and sustained the darkest supernatural imaginings and 
traditions of the uncanny. 

Above all our cities, Edinburgh is famous for her 
ghost-lore, and the world knows how her two famous 
sons, Scott and Stevenson, created the best ghost- 
stories ever written in English. Edinburgh inspired 

157 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

James Hogg with his uncanny masterpiece, and even 
Dickens did not escape her spell, for has not his richest 
ghost-invention for its prologue the Bagman's Uncle 
on the North Bridge musing over the fantastic city ? 
And for more tangible examples of her power to 
arouse the spirit of dread in the hearts of men, are 
there not the authenticated stories of haunted houses 
in desirable parts of the Old Town, which, even until 
the middle of last century, lay empty and were shunned 
by the very poorest, although they might live in them 
rent free ? The experience related by that desperate 
cobbler Patullo, who sought to rescue Major Weir's 
mansion in the West Bow from the dominion of 
darkness, seems not so much an account of what 
actually happened as of what the populace were hoping 
fearfully would happen — and Patullo was distinctly 
of the populace. 

It is not difficult to see how, down to the 
beginning of the last century, the mind of the people 
in the Old Town had a natural bias towards the 
supernatural, and was, as photographers say, " sensi- 
tised " to its suggestion and well developed, as it 

158 





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WliST BOW 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

were, in this dark room. The darkness in which, 
as a consequence of the peculiarities of its architec- 
ture, so much of their life was spent ; the spectral 
presence of the haar^ and the strange sounds of the 
wind at night in the high, rat-ridden lands-, the 
proximity of graveyards and ancient houses every- 
where, with their traditions of sudden death and 
unravelled mysteries ; the constant reading and literal 
belief in the Old Testament, and the genius of the 
old Calvinist spirit for Satanic visions — these influences 
combined and reacted on a people who derived 
something speculative from their Teutonic ancestry 
and something mystic from the Celts. 

There is a peculiar gusto and smack in the intimate 
details of many of the Edinburgh legends of horror 
that argue sharp pleasures of the imagination, as though 
the sensuousness of a people narrowly restrained by 
a religion that forbade colour and ritual, and a 
climate grudging of warmth and fruit, had turned 
inward for dainty feeding. 

There is something secret, despite their teeming life, 

in the physiognomy of the monumental buildings, 

i6o 



GHOSTS 



that seem too securely built to be the lodgings only 
for the living, especially as they stand at dawn — aged, 
permanent, enigmatic as Egyptian tombs, fronting an 
empty, silent world ; or, stranger still in the white 
haar that steals up in wispy battalions from the North 
Sea, lingering about the closes, and dissolving the 
storeys one after another into thin white air, in which 
even the Castle becomes a phantom. On the minds 
of the people, especially of children, driven indoors 
by this delicate assailant, the effect is worth con- 
sidering. ^' It was like a man made o' haar^'' an 
old Edinburgh nurse said to an ignorant child when 
explaining what a ghost was. Now haar is the only 
atmospheric phenomenon that would be helpful here. 
Snow appears in busy, tangible companies filling the 
whole sky, obviously sent from heaven for purposes 
of its own ; rain is drops of water, as every child 
knows ; moonlight has no motion of its own ; fog, in 
the ordinary way, would only raise up a vision oi 
a chimney-sweep. But Jiaa?- — haar is white and 
clammy and never still. It appears in the houses. 

You can see it coming towards you. It is itsell a 

i6i X 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

wraith ; so any Edinburgh child can tell a ghost 

immediately it sees one. 

And if the white sights of Edinburgh assist the 

sentiment for the uncanny, there is also a unique 

apportionment of darkness to excite the mind 

to people the unknown with exaggerated fancies. 

The dark closes and stairs and corridors, the narrow 

wynds where the grey and ghastly light filters down 

between the buildings, the darkened rooms with small 

shot-windows, or windows with small panes in heavy 

wooden frames, the stone walls, four feet thick, that shut 

out all sound and give a sense of prison — all combine 

to cast the mind back on itself and give it a gloomy 

direction. In a sense unknown to southern cities, 

the people of Old Edinburgh walk in shadow. 

There is darkness enough in the long winter, but 

in many of the turnpike stairs and in the narrow 

wynds the gloom hangs from January to December. 

On the sunniest day you have only to turn off the 

High Street, or the Canongate, or Greenside, and you 

see people disappearing into entries of impenetrable 

darkness to hive in rooms where it is always night. 

162 



GHOSTS 



That is in the parts of the Old Town where the 
poorer classes live, but even the lawyer, going to and 
from the Law Courts in the High Street, cannot but 
feel something of the spell. The University brings the 
students into the Old 
Town, and now Settle- 
ments are keeping 
many of them there. 
The manifold charities 
of Edinburgh bring 
women of all classes 
into its slums. The 
boy of romantic percej)- 
tions at school or col- 
lege, given the key of 
the Edinburgh streets, 
is given the key to much more. How young Scott 
must have prowled about the closes and wynds on 
his way home from the High School to George Square, 
his great head already teeming with visions of the 
past. It is probably a personal reminiscence when he 
says, " Ikjld indeed was the urchin who approached the 







THE OLD UNIVERSITY 



163 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

gloomy house in West Bow with the risk of seeing 

Major Weir's enchanted stafF parading the desolate 

apartments, or hearing the hum of the necromantic 

wheel of his sister Grizel." And James Hogg, 

stravaiging round the town, visiting this and that 

friend high up in the lands ^ soon forgot the brownies 

of Ettrick for the familiars of the Canongate. He 

has left the uncanny secret of the Old Town, with all 

its whispers and shadows, in The Confessions of a 

yustified Sinner^ where Old Edinburgh and the Old 

Testament make an unholy confluence. And who 

can doubt that the haunted city bent the mind of 

young Robert Louis Stevenson with every skirling 

wind that shook its stony t'gallants and sobbed 

through the closes, though his thoughts even then 

were turning towards the New Town — to the long 

vista of little beckoning lamps lit by Leerie in the 

gloaming to star the steep rainy streets that led him 

at last down to the sea ? 

These are some impressions of the Old Town, 

with its darkness and haar and strange habitations 

and peculiarities, which may be helpful for the 

164 



GHOSTS 



better understanding of the powerful effects of Scott, 
Chambers, Stevenson and Hogg, in whose works 
the spiritual essence of Old Edinburgh is preserved 
in all its potency. Although the Edinburgh of the 
twentieth century is ever changing, superstition has not 
quite fled from it ; wisps of it still hang about the old 
lands as the Gothic darkness lingers in their long 
lobbies and stair-towers. A few stories were told to 
me of apparitions and inexplicable sounds and lights 
in shut-up houses, but nowadays townspeople will not 
talk to strangers about these matters, and the great 
majority are not interested in them. One old woman, 
who was said to have had an uncanny experience, 
would say no more than that " she had lived in the 
close for forty years and had never seen any one worse 
than hersel'." This was not an uncommon formula. 
Another evasive answer was that they were " a stranger 
in the close and couldna say." Of course, it was 
only on rare occasions that one could venture to 
lead the talk towards the supernatural. That a com- 
munity which for some hundred years should have 

shown a peculiar genius for perceiving and creating 

165 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

ghosts, should now have altogether lost the faculty, 
seemed unlikely, and with patience, friends and luck, 
I gathered a little evidence that in some corners of 
the ancient town the old element was still working 
behind the everyday life of the closes. The incidents 
which I will now relate are offered as a footnote to 
Edinburgh ghost-lore. They could only have hap- 
pened where there was a communal belief in the 
apparitions. The legend which the ghost perpetuated 
was lost, but the ghost appeared more mysterious 
than ever in its unattached condition. 

The first ghost frequented the appropriate locality 
of Chessel's Court in the Canongate, a decayed and 
melancholy land that still faces its little forecourt 
with a certain stateliness. Its dull, darkened rooms 
bear carved insignia and arms of forgotten families, 
and in its dim chimney panels faded nymphs in 
golden brown groves glimmer a little in the fire- 
light, while heavy plaster symbols, that have long lost 
their meaning, still decorate the mantelpieces and 
door-heads. In one room in the west wing there is 

a white plaster festoon in high relief on a panel 

i66 



GHOSTS 



over the mantel which affected in an eerie way the 
old doited granny who lived there. She connected 
it in some way with a child's mort-cloth, and when 
a stranger came into her room she would take him 
by the arm and say, ^' Look, look at thon cloth. 
D'ye ken what it's for ? There's a dead wean hid 
ahmt It. 

It is certainly an eerie land. Its now dingy 
glories bring the old life near to us, and one's 
thoughts drift back to the dead and gone gentlefolk 
who once came and went by these tall doors and 
looked out of the beaded windows. 

The woman who told the story of the Chessel's 

Court ghost, lived in a very ancient house in the 

Lawnmarket. She was a middle-aged wife of the 

name of Gordon. Her story came out in answer 

to a remark by an old woman who sat very stifBy 

in a corner chair and corroborated each detail. Mrs. 

Gordon was a pleasant, earnest woman, and as she 

went on with her story she ceased to work about 

her kitchen. " I had heard a lot about it, but I 

never saw it," she said, '^ although I have been near 

167 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

seeing it. We lived on the top flat, and that was 
where it was said to be. It had been there lang 
syne. One nicht I was in the room, and I heard 
somebody breathing hard just outside the door. It 
was like some yin stopping after climbing the stairs 
before going on. I opened the door and looked 
out with the candle in my hand. It was naebody — 
it was the ghost. Mony times again I heard it 
— breathing hard at the top o' the stairs just as 
I'm telling you. But I never saw it right. My 
guid-brither did — O, he saw it and near lost his 
mind. 

" He was sleepin' in his bed in the big room. It 
was an old-fashioned room, as maybe you know, with 
a recess a' carved-like. It must have been a grand 
room in the auld days. The recess was too small 
for him, he being big, so the bed was sort o' half 
in the recess and half oot. In the middle o' the 
nicht he woke up sudden. What was it? Oot 
comes something past him as though it had cam' 
oot o' the recess. It was like a tall woman in black 

silk, and the dress stuck oot a' round and near took 

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EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Up the hale room, and he couldna see the face o' it, 
for it had a long black veil covering the hale heid. 
It was awfu' tall, just as the folk said. Weel, there 
he was, a' in a sweat, and the ghost was clean 
vanished. He up and on wi' his claes and oot o' 
the house, and that was the last we had o' him, for 
he wouldna stop, no' if ye had peyed him for it. 
I had heard say that the woman had to do with the 
recess. She had hanged herseP there or something in 
the auld times. I never saw her mysel', but I have 
heard her at the top of the stairs in the dark . . . 
breathing hard . . . just outside the door." 

Another Old Town ghost story that was told to 
me had a farcical turn that amateurs of the super- 
natural may not like, but it is, I think, the right sort 
of farce — the sort of joke, in short, that the other 
ghosts would tell against the ghost of the story some 
dawn after cock-crow, when their night's work was 
over and they were gossiping together in Limbo. It 
is the story of the ghost in Bible-land, that tall, 
rough-hewn old Canongate building with the carved 

panel over the close that bears an open Bible and a 

170 



GHOSTS 



holy inscription. It was told to mc by Mrs. Scrougal, 
whose house is also in the Lawnmarket, and it is 
mainly about Mr. Scrougal. Mr. Scrougal, before he 
took up with her, was courting a young woman that 
stopped in a house on the top 
flat of Bible-land. One night Mr. 
Scrougal had taken her home 
from a party and had seen her 
up the stair to her door. At 
the top landing he saw the ghost. 
He aye described it as like a middle- 
aged wife in an old-fashioned tartan 
gown and a white apron, with a 
white mutch on her head, and it had a terrible effect on 
Mr. Scrougal, for he ran downstairs and near tumbled. 
Aye well, he came back two nights later and told 
the young woman's fither what he had seen, but the 
father just roared and laughed at him taking so much 
notice of it. They had all seen it often and often, 
and had stopped paying any heed to it, and they 
were awful diverted at him making all the hullabaloo 

just because he saw it. It was always seen at the 

171 




DOORIIEAD, BIBLE-LAND 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

same place on the landing, and that was the place, 
they say, where the wife was killed. Anyway, Mr. 
Scrougal, displeased at the way the lassie's father 
went on about it, began to stop going there. The 
end of it was that he cooled off in that courtship 
and ultimately married the lady who told me the 
story. Many tales have been told of the intervention 
of the supernatural in the affairs of everyday life, but 
seldom has it been so effective and satisfactory as 
in the case of the ghost in tartan in the Bible-land 
in the Canongate. 

These are present-day ghost stories of the Old 
Town of Edinburgh, and their main interest is that both 
show a communal telepathic suggestion still at work. 
Mrs. Gordon would not have heard, and her guid- 
brother probably would not have seen, the Chessel's 
Court ghost, if they had not been supported by the 
public opinion of the district. Mr. Scrougal saw 
his ghost through the same psychic atmosphere, and 
his mistake was that he did not fall into line with 
the others and accept it as part of the fixtures of 

Bible-land. 

172 



GHOSTS 



So much for the Old Town folk. How far the 
ghost-spirit of the past works in the minds of the 
descendants of those who dwelt on the haunted ridge, 
is a much more difficult thing to learn. One can 
say at least that a knowledge of ghost lore and eerie 
legend is more widely spread here than in other 
towns. The fashionable forms of psychic experiment, 
with which I am not here concerned, are said to 
have a considerable following on the Drumsheugh 
headlands. 

One of the most charming of my recollections 
is of a little luncheon party in a delectable square, 
where the stones of the houses are purple and ochre 
and grey, and the rough setts in its little-used streets 
are tinged with delicate moss and hair-like grass — 
the final touch of beauty. The centre is a wide 
misty green garden, and the whole place is like an 
elegant old sedan-chair, gently decaying, with bright 
glass still in the lozenge panels. 

In a house in this square where, if anywhere, 
people had the right to talk of such things — for at 

Number 28 dwelt the most notorious hanging judge 

173 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of a hanging time, whose memory is kept green in 
the tall hemlocks in the little back-garden — every one 
happened to talk of ghosts. It may only, of course. 




GEORGE SQUARE 

have been a coincidence, but there it was ; they were 
talking about ghosts, although ghosts at luncheon are 
rather like liqueurs at breakfast, and such is the interest 

in affairs of the mind in this delightful city that no 

174 



GHOSTS 



one seemed unfriendly to the turn of the talk, and 
every one was willing to give ol their best and to 
tell it with an art which, alas, I cannot imitate. One 
lady had visited the island of Inchcolm in a small 
boat. They had spent some time on the island, and 
were rowing away when some one in the boat cried, 
"Look! look !" Then thev all saw quite clearly the 
head and shoulders of a monk leaning over one of 
the windows of the ruin there and looking at them. 
It was a bright evening before sunset. Afterwards 
they all compared their recollections of the apparition, 
and it was the same to each person. 

The other story was more extraordinary and differs 
in kind from any I have read. It had happened 
some years ago, when the lady who told it was 
a girl at school. The family had gone into the 
country for the summer, and were living in an old- 
fashioned house whose history the lady did not know. 
One morning when she was lying in bed watching the 
sunshine in the big bedroom, she saw a very wild 
thing a figure of a strangely distorted and deformed 

kind, very awful to behold, and it was dancing in 

'75 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

the sunlight. She saw it quite distinctly, and, unable 
to cry out, fainted away. She never said a word 
to any one about the apparition. One morning, about 
a year afterwards, in their Edinburgh house, she 
was at her school work, and her younger sister 
was practising at the piano. This was very annoying, 
and she asked her sister to stop, but she still went 
on strumming. At last she cried, " If you don't 
stop playing, I'll show you something very horrible — 
something more horrible than anything you've ever 
seen in all your life." The sister, however, said she 
didn't care, and went on playing. The other girl 
then drew as carefully as she could the horrible thing 
she had seen dancing in the bedroom of the old 
house in the country, and when she was done she 
put the drawing on the piano and said, " There ! " 
Her sister looked at it, instantly stopped playing, 
and became terribly agitated, crying out, " Oh, did 
you see it too ? Did you see le bedroom of 

the old house at ? " She had seen the thing 

herself, and had determined never to tell any one, 

because it was too horrible. ^'THOZVIOJ gDViiiiq 



176 



— MOO^ 
HDAJAq aOO^YJOH 



GHOSTS 



There was a silence after this. The lady was 
agitated by the memory of the affiiir, and the others 
were turning it over in their minds and wondering 
whether they might ask questions, whether she would 
draw the horror again for us. Then some one relieved 
the tension by talking of the other side of ghost 
affairs. Ghosts were terrible to man, not because he 
believed in them, but because he didn't believe in 
them. To a person who did not believe in ghosts 
nothing could be so shattering as the sudden appear- 
ance of a ghost. A person who did believe in ghosts, 
on the other hand, would be supported at the moment 
of the apparition by the knowledge that his or her 
theory had been the right one. The thing was to 
domesticate your ghost as in the story of Mr. Scrougal. 
Yes, that was the sound view — to domesticate one's 
ghost. . . . And where could one domesticate a 
ghost so well as in Edinburgh ? 

The lamps were being lit and the misty winter 
evening was creeping over the square as I left the 
house. A company of young men and women came 

out of the gardens talking briskly together as they 

177 z 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

walked towards the student Settlements in the houses 
at the north end. Doors were shut on their laughter 
and talk, and the old square lay quite silent in the 
mists ; its sober, seemly little houses, each so like 
its neighbours, yet each with its own physiognomy 
and its individual load of experience, seemed to assume 
an air of watchfulness and expectancy. My eye was 
drawn by the little doors with their Doric portals 
and clean doorsteps (some with small flights of steps) 
all round the square. The aspect of the place at 
this hour, its sober key pitched low enough to be 
as friendly to phantoms as to ourselves, made it that 
moment to conjure up (if much wistfulness make 
good enchantment) my square's old tenants. How 
if each and all of them, one after another through the 
generations, were to cross this quiet spot and turn 
each to his own old grey-brown house, go up the 
steps and open his door ! What a company they 
would be ! how much of the wit, learning and 
bravery of that old Edinburgh which was an intellec- 
tual centre of Europe, would pass through that little 

square. There would be the tall, blue-coated figure 

178 



GHOSTS 



of Sir Ralph Abercrombie, who went about the square 

with a pet ape which wore a cocked hat and was once 

identified by an old lady as one of " thae awfu' French 

prisoners." The stout old Admiral Duncan who kept 

in No. 5, the great ensign and sword of the Dutch 

admiral he took at Camperdown ; Harry Erskine, with 

his flashing eye and wide, sensitive mouth, the fearless 

advocate and friend of every poor man in Scotland ; 

Lord President Blair, the greatest lawyer the country 

ever had (" Ma man, God Almighty spared nae pains 

when He made your brains ") ; Jamieson the Scots 

lexicographer, the Duchess of Gordon, and many 

another notable figure and many a lord and lady with 

an historic name. Lady Don, the last person in 

Edinburgh to keep a sedan-chair, would be borne 

in it up her steps by her uniformed bearers. 

And then there are the figures who go down the 

steps. At No. 25 a man, booted, cloaked, and muffled 

to the eyes, comes out quickly by himself, looks right 

and left and walks away with his head bent. A moment 

afterwards a window lifts and a tea-cup is thrown 

out, falling sliattered on the stones, and a voice cries, 

179 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



'' Neither lips of me nor mine come after Murray of 
Broughton's." A boy opens the door and peeps out 
at the broken cup with a strange excited look on 

his young face. He is 



lame, and his head has 
almost a misshapen look 
in its height and weight. 
He wears a large green 
waistcoat with two rows of 
buttons, corduroy breeks 
tied at the knee by a 
knot of brown cotton 
tape, and white stockings. 
He goes back to the 
house slowly. Old Scott 
threw the cup out of his window, for Murray of 
Broughton was a traitor ; young Walter kept the 
saucer, for Murray of Broughton was history and 
romance. 

But as I dream in the misty old square and summon 
up these figures of the past, a dark, rough-looking old 

ghost with stick and lanthorn comes stumping along, 

1 80 




■C^-JW^rfey-^J^t ^^JS"^ >*1^_ 



STATUE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT 
IN ADVOCATES' LIBRARY 



GHOSTS 



and as he passes, a ferocious eye under humorously 
twitching eyebrows and a sneering cudgel nose appear. 
Then, from the taut bibulous mouth the lower lip 
juts out, and the shrewd eye of old Braxlield winks 
at the dreamer nursing liis little fancies, and the voice 
that shook the Courts a hundred years ago, cries 
in its rough, old-fashioned tones, " Signor Fiddle- 
eerie, Signor Fiddle-eerie," and then over his shoulder, 
'' O, for Goad's sake, no more of the Signor." 



i«i 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PENNY PLAIN WITH A TINT 

I WOULD leave many a famous thing in Edinburgh 
unvisited for the sake of Leith Walk. Its attraction 
is always active, but how is one exactly to put one's 
finger on the cause so that the eyes of the un- 
sympathetic may be opened ! It represents a half- 
shabby side of Edinburgh that is always overlooked, 
although the part it plays in the drama of the city 
will be found on consideration to have contributed 
much to your enjoyment of the piece. Nicolson 
Street, Fountainbridge, Bristo Street, and many other 
elderly parts of the city have much the same air, but 
Leith Walk must be taken as the best statement of 
their case. 

It is old-fashioned rather than old, weighty and 
singular in its architecture, but not stately or grim. 
Queens have ridden up its brae to a life of strange 

and terrible happenings, English armies have tramped 

182 




w'if 










LEITH WALK 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

along it to set Edinburgh in a lowe, but somehow 
Leith Walk does not associate itself with history, nor 
is there an ancient building (hardly even a new one) 
throughout its length. It stands dourly apart and 
must be liked for itself. The only associations that 
help one to its spirit are Carlyle's story of the Russian 
sailors climbing its lamp-posts to drink the oil, and 
leaving Leith Walk in eclipse so long as the Russian 
fleet was in the Firth in 1799, and the note to one 
of old Geikie's etchings that tells how, after their 
fish and oysters were sold, the Newhaven fishwives 
would meet at a rendezvous for a single dram, sally 
forth with empty creels, and march down Leith Walk 
in a breast, singing in full chorus "The Boatie Row." 
What, then, is its attraction ? I think the answer 
is that it presents to us the everyday world of 
yesterday in so striking and complete a form that it 
wears some of the graces of antiquity. We know 
buildings that have the interest of a bygone age 
that now seems a period of romance, and we identify 
what is elderly enough to be old-fashioned and dowdy ; 

but we rarely recognise any stage between the two. 

184 



PENNY PLAIN WITH A TINT 

It is a mark of an age over-conscious of its pace 
that in certain things we should be able to see the 
picturesque in the recent. Our fathers collected 
samplers and Paisley shawls, and our elegants are 
beginning to collect coloured prints of the Crystal 
Palace, and Berlin wool-work, and horsehair furniture. 
But although people are conscious of a charm in the 
characteristic nicknacks of yesterday, they have not 
yet made a cult of it in street architecture. In Leith 
Walk you feel dimly the romantic satisfactions of 
posterity ; you may pluck, as it were, the first shy 
buds of antiquity. It is, indeed, the street for the 
epicure of topography. 

1 like its narrow neck between the tall grey lancis^ 
especially those on the west side with the semi- 
octagonal towers and the broad, shabby gallery with 
shops on it where no one seems to go. The shops 
beneath the gallery are of the busy, popular, amusing 
sort that sell Edinburgh Rock, and five cigars for a 
shilling, and little canes with coloured tops which 
wise fathers give to clever sons who count correctly 
the n umber of storeys in the tallest Uuul in the Old 

185 2 A 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Town, and photographs of Edinburgh Castle in a 

border of tiny shells for bluejackets to take back to 

Portsmouth. Then, as survivals from a superior past, 

there is the aromatic old shortbread shop that sweetens 

its whole neighbourhood, and a gargantuan tobacco 

shop with mounds and plateaux of tobacco in the 

windows, before which you often see countrymen 

pause and remark to one another that there is corn 

in Egypt yet. Often I have looked for the stationer's 

shop of Stevenson's boyhood. You remember it ? 

The shop " in whose window all the year round 

there stood displayed a theatre in working order 

with a ' forest set,' a ' combat ' and a few ' robbers 

carousing ' in the slides ; and below and about — 

dearer tenfold to me ! — the plays themselves, those 

budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another — 

a penny plain, two pence coloured." I have often 

thought that Leith Walk, in its relation to the High 

Street, was the Penny Plain of Edinburgh on which 

the brush of Time is beginning half-sportively to lay 

a faint tint or two of his Twopenny Colour. 

One or two of those queer underground shops 

i86 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

and taverns that used to startle strangers so much 
can still be found here. These cellar shops seem 
the very doors to the Auld Reekie of the poet 
Fergusson ; they suggest a thickly-fumed under- 
world of cosiness and tightness and dimness " where 
couthy chiels at e'ening meet." They seem to be 
cowering down from the wind and rain that vex 
the upper street : — 

" Not Boreas that sae snelly blows 
Dare here pap in his angry nose." 

There are still several of them in the Old Town and 
in the old part of the New Town to give the lie to 
the story that Edinburgh loves the bottle overmuch — 
only a sober people could have preserved its neck for 
a week among these man-traps. In the past decade 
many have gone, but that very wide shop, baited with 
a fragrance of hot mutton-pies, that opens so suddenly 
in the half-octagon here, is still in its place, and so 
too is the old wooden Highlandman outside the 
tobacco shop near by. The bad boys — Borrow will 
tell you about them — used to send him whirling down 



PENNY PLAIN WTPH A IINT 

the Steep street (" Aw, \er kiltie's ;i\\a' ! ^ e\e lost 

ver kiltie ! ") to he reeo\erecl near f,eitli. Rut now 

his little tr()lle\- on wheels has \)ccn Liken Ironi Inni 

and his tra\'els are o\'er. lie stands hiizh hi a small 

O 

barbed niehe beside the door and offers a pineh of 

snud- to the birds. 

But beyond its attraction as the choicest expression 

of the Peniu' Plain in transition to the Twopenny 

Coloured, Leith Walk has an interest that is much 

more apparent. lew things in I'.dinburgh aix' really 

more astonishing; than the way this G^reat thorouLjhIare 

spurts dovvn its steep gorge from Princes Street and 

gradually widens until, dammed Iw the little (ully- 

licensed islaiul ol bmldings opposite the theatre, it 

seems to burst its banks and, attaining: Ama/onian 

width, rolls down the hill with terrihc force, beariim 

tram-cars like cockle-shells on its bosom. It must be 

a sundering llood to timid friends who lu'c on (liferent 

sides. I could stand lor hours ami watch it Irom 

the bottom ol Pi(ard\- Phu e. Its enormous scale is 

im reaped by the meaiire traflic, and its downward 

rush by the sharj)ly diminishing perspi^etue ol the 

189 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

iron lamp-standards in the middle of the road. If 
you look long enough, it has the active fascination 
of a view from a precipice ; your legs begin in- 
voluntarily to move, and unless you look out you 
will find yourself trotting. It summons up a vision 
of all Edinburgh some day following an irresistible 
impulse and pouring in a multitude down the steep 
faster and faster and souse into the sea ! 



190 



CIIAPIIR \'II 



AN 1IISI(JRIC \I. CIIAKAC'ri'.R 

Of the clistnuti\c picturcscjiK- figures in the e()iith\', 
ehirtN' OKI 1 (.liiibiirn-h of l^ohert l''er(£iiss()irs poems 
onlv one sur\i\es to walk the lAhnhiirtj^li streets to-ciaw 
The (,-it\' Ciiiarcl (" yon hhiek haiuhlti ") laid ch)\\ ii 
tlieir f-oehaher axes about (lie tune of VVaterhx). 
Seott tells (jf one ov two grey-heatlecl, grey-heardeil 
Hii£hlan(lmen with war-worn features, bent doubh- b\ 
age, aiul dre-s^ed in old-fashioned eoeked-hats, bounti 
with \\hi(e tape instead ol silver lace, and m coat, 
vvaisteoaf, and breeches of muddy-coloured red, still 
hearing in their \\athrrrd hands this ancaeiit \M.a[i()n 
as kite as iSiy. I hcsc- phantoms of lormer da\s, 
he said, "crept arouiul ihe statue of (-harles the 
Sc-cond in karliament Scpiare as if tin.- image ol a 
Stuart wc-ri- ihc- last refuge for an\ memorial of oiu' 
am lent manners." I hr lli(.diland (hair man \\ ho 
" gied hi. light to deeds o' darkiu-ss ami o' night," 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

and to more reputable business with which Fergusson 
was perhaps less familiar, has vanished with his chair, 
and only a few metal badges remain in the City 
Museum to show us how he appeared in his long 
square-tailed coat, and how honesty was impressed 
upon him as a policy. 

The " cawdie " or caddie, although it was not 
found necessary to engrave the axiom on his badge, 
had a great name for honesty. Captain Topham wrote 
that you could trust the caddie with any sum of money 
you pleased, and, if he lost it, his Society would make 
it good, and that it did so on an occasion when 
the loss was jT^oo ! The caddie has not departed, 
though his paper-lantern has, but he has suffered a 
tee-change into an autocrat of the golf links whom 
you cannot so completely trust with lost balls. The 
Blue-gownsmen, the peep-show Jamies, and the ballad- 
singers have all gone. 

Only one old-world figure remains, but she is the 

most picturesque in costume and the most interesting 

personality of them all. I mean, of course, the 

Newhaven fishwife. With a few slight changes the 

192 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER 



costume she wears to-day can be traced back through 
pictures and descriptions for at least two hundred 
years. For at least five centuries she has served 
Edinburo^h much as she . 

does to-day. Newhaven 
has been the nearest fish- 
ing village to Edinburgh 
for much longer than that, 
and until the middle of 
the eighteenth century fish 




NEWHAVEN FISHWIVES 



was almost the only meat 
the poorer citizens knew. 
Every visitor to Edin- 
burgh knows and likes the 
Newhaven fishwife. One of the most intimate satisfac- 
tions Edinburgh aiTords on return after a long absence, 
is to see her again going about the streets with her 
quaint dress and creel. She would be more missed than 
the Scott monument. She carries history in her creel. 
When Edinburgh men wore bufi jerkins and steel 
caps, she was climbing up from her red-tiled village 
to feed them with her fish. Probably she went 



^9T. 



2 B 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

to John Knox's back-door behind the Canongate, 
although the scared monks in the Abbey must have 
been better customers. All through the killing times 
she would be there selling her fish to persecutor 
and martyr, and when Prince Charlie came to Holy- 
rood she would be at the doors with rumours of 
Hanoverian fleets in the Firth ; and so down the 
ages. She has had a word from nearly all the writers 
on Edinburgh. Charles Reade in his Christie yohn- 
stone made her an ideal. Lady Nairne's great song, 
" Caller Herrin'," has touched our ideas of her 
with tragedy and tenderness. The air of the song 
was suggested to Nathaniel Gow by the cries of the 
Newhaven fishwives in George Street blending with 
the chimes of St. Andrew's Church bells. Henley 
had described her costume : — 

" A wide blue coat, a squat and sturdy throng 
Of curt blue coats, a mutch without a speck, 
A white vest broidered black, her person deck, 
Nor seemed their old-world quaintness wrong. 
Her great creel forehead slung, she wanders nigh, 
Easing the great strap with her gnarled brown fingers, 
The spirit of traffic watchful in her eye 
Ever and anon imploring you to buy." 

194 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTKR 



1 Icnkv dui noc mention her slnpc^l, colourccl pctticoals, 
which ^how below the iij)j)er blue skirt, her Mack 
stockings aiul neat shoes. Some ol the women wear 
no otiier head-dress tlian their own abundant hair 
combed ch)se and smooth. 1 he creel rests on the 
hack below the waist, and is steadied on the top by 
a broatl Ixmd which ltocs round the forehead. Ihc 
cleanness, neatness, suitability and picturescjuencss of 
the drcss enhances their appearance whether they be 
vountz or old. I liavc seen one younir naiad in 
Princes Street, her reddish \ellow hair u^listeninir in 
the sun, her colour clear and high, her eve \'ery 
l)right, sea-blue and steadfast, and her firm blond arms 
bare to the elbow. Mer stronix vounix fiizurc would 
once have been thought a trifle too broad, but 
to-dav no one would deny its beauty. Yet somehow, 
although lulmburgh is a house of call to rich men ol 
all countries, wo one seems yet to ha\e had the sense 
and spirit to make a match of it with a Xewha\-en 
lassie. When C'harles Keade makes it clear that 
I/)r(l Ip-^deii is not going to marr\ ( hri^ie |ohnstone, 
I conless that I l(j-,t all patienc*.- with the book. 



•V5 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

With the old women the dress is yet more suitable, 

a soberer colouring of shawl and petticoat being the 

chief difference, but it can be worn only by those 

whom Nature has honoured with a noble physique. 

I had the good fortune to be entertained by one 

old lady who had the fineness of age and the white 

spotless mutch of the best of Hals' old Regentessen. 

She was nearing eighty, yet her ankle was shapely, 

and her arms and hands had not lost their firm 

strength. Her wrinkled face was bleached to an 

extreme clean whiteness, which was not the pallor of 

age. It was firm and dimpled when she smiled. She 

said that she did not go out with the creel in thae 

days. Something went wrang with her ; she couldna 

right say what it was — a sort o' closeness in the 

chest, she thought. So she had stopped going out 

with the creel. When was that ? Oh, she would 

hae been about sixty-five when that happened till 

her. It was very hard work in her young days, 

before the cars came, carrying the creel up the hill 

to Edinburgh and whiles up the high scale-stairs 

on the top of it. In her mother's time it must have 

196 



\X HISTORICAL CHARACTF.R 



bK.L-i\ worse when LlK'ir cIikI L-ii^.t()nK-r> lucil on the 
sc\L'iuli aiul eighth lloors iii the I .awnniarkcl aiul 
UiL^li Street. 

She saitl it \\■a^ an orilniar\' tiling ior a iisliwile 
to carry two luiiulrei.lweiL;lit on her hack. This 
seemed to ine at hrst onl\ the over-statement ol ohl 
age, hnt SLihsee|uent uu[unA' ainonsj; hsh-salesnien and 
h^hernien eontirnied her ^tor\ . 1 he creel proper 



lokis al'JOLit a huiuiredw eiifht am 



t) 



Kill, ami the 



shaHow basket or j"/v/// that tits on the top olten con- 
tains hall a lumdredweiiiht oi hiL-- cod. \\\ old woman 
had ijone day after ckiy up the lon^z Leith Walk in 
rain and wmd and snow and sun, up into h,dml)urL;h 
with the herriuL^ ant! tish (the lisher h)lk make- this 
distinctioiij Ire^h Irom the sea. Now she sat in peace 
in a l)(;wer ol hright tinkling- china and jiictures ol 
old sliips and curioNities Irom ti lurs dead and l!,()IH-, 
and her (zrandsons told her thcii' latest oimauns as 
l5oy Scouts. 

lake most old people, s!n- hail her douhts aliout 
the new generation. ilaitlK om- ol (he NcAvhaceii 

lassies nowadays would carry the creel like ihcir 

">7 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

mothers, and they were lengthening their dress 
down to their shoes. They might be onything. 
Naebody would tak' them for decent Newhaven 
lassies. And so to old Newhaven it was an indeli- 
cacy to cover the stocking just as it is in dafter 
places to reveal it. 

The old lady I have mentioned is sometimes 
called the Queen of Newhaven, in token whereof 
she is said to wear twelve petticoats. The number 
worn by the Newhaven wives in general has long 
been a matter of much curiosity to their neigh- 
bours " up the hill," but naturally enough it is a 
subject on which very little information is avail- 
able. Although their reputation is very different 
indeed from the women of Billingsgate, they can 
speak directly to the point, especially when any 
attempt is made to make free with their peculiarities. 
A rejoinder that is remembered with pride in the 
village was made by a fishwife to a lady in a tram- 
car who put to her the inopportune question how 
many petticoats did she, as a Newhaven fishwife, 

really wear? "Eh well, mem," she replied, *^if 

198 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER 

you'll let me coont yours Til let you coont mine." 
This was considered very elective, especially as it 
was made in the hobble year 19 lo. The usual 
number, however, is said to be eight or nine. The 
reason for this multiplicity of petticoats is that the 
creel drips continually and a stout protection is 
necessary, although rheumatism always finds its way 
in. Moreover, they are useful as forming a saddle 
for the creel. 

The old communal life of their village is ebbing 
away and the young people are free to follow easier 
trades. Intermarriage within the community which, 
as it produced women who could carry a two-hundred- 
weight load into Edinburgh, seems certainly to have 
brought no decadence, is now less common. It 
flourished not so much through the exclusiveness of 
an ancient community as from common sense : a 
Newhaven man who married a stranger had no one 
trained to prepare his nets and bait and to carry 
and sell his fish, and so his lot, hard in any case, 
became yet harder. 

A Newhaven marriage, being a union of gifts as 

199 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

well as of hearts, was worthy of much celebration. 
The whole community prepared for it, and went 
through the solemnity of " the walk " after the 
wedding. The bride and bridegroom headed the 
parade, followed by all the younger people of the 
village ; the men wearing white jean trousers and 
blue pilot-jackets with velvet collars and Balmoral 
bonnets with strings, the girls all in white. A 
man just past middle age told me that a hundred 
couples had walked at his wedding. It was the tram- 
way cars that put an end to this pleasing pageant. 
Their success in bringing people down from Edin- 
burgh to see " the walk " decided the Newhaven 
folk not to walk again. 

After " the walk " the company went to one of 
the three hotels, where dancing was carried on till 
morning. At my friend's wedding there was only 
space in the room for three couples and the fiddler. 
They danced a sort of jig, very fierce and continuous, 
and when they slacked, eager voices at the door 
shouted to them to come ashore and let fresh couples 

take their place. Next morning a curious custom 

200 



AX HISTORICAL CHARACTER 

was observed by the friends of the bridegroom taking 
him down to the beach with his wife's creel on his 
back and filling it with stones. He had then to 
stagger back to his home with it, and so prove that 
he could support a wife. 

There must be a good deal in the old Newhaven 
superstition that when fishermen die they are changed 
into seagulls. After sailing the contrary waters for 
many years, what a liberation to sail the air freely, 
without a care for time or tide, wind or calm ; to 
see your fishy quarry from a height, to take no 
more of them than you fancy, to have done with 
counting and bargaining and worry about sending your 
catch into the city, or by early trains to the great 
towns. You eat your own fish and your work is 
done. Then you rest on the water and perhaps 
sleep. You are your own boat as you are your own 
net and market and customers. What a change it 
must be after the unceasing preparation, toil and 
anxiety of a fisherman's life ! 

This belief — superstition, if you will — must re- 
present the dream of the old fisherman who only 

20 1 2 c 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

hopes that things will really work out in this sensible 
way. It would not then be necessary to rearrange 
many of his thoughts and habits. He and the 
seagull have so much in common : the preoccupation 
with fish, the keen eye, the strong sense of smell 
without finnicky dislikes ; the same robust ideas about 
weather and wetness. Practice in a flapping oilskin 
coat would make wings fairly easy to manage. The 
Newhaven gulls, I noticed, came ashore a good deal, 
not in little screaming packs, like the silly Thames 
gulls, but singly and with much gravity. In the 
morning you will see them at intervals perched on 
the shore-wall from Newhaven to the Wardie Hotel — 
huge grey fowls big as ducks, solemn and silent, 
but for a firm insistent squawk now and then to 
remind their allies in the houses that breakfast is 
late. I have never seen such large and decorous 
seagulls. They sail over the low old fishing village, 
and sometimes land on those broad crooked fore- 
stairs with the strong wooden railings, that lead to 
the upper floors of the cottages, or walk a few steps 

on the gravestones (possibly their own) of old fisher- 

202 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER 

men in the little churchyard. When the lishing-boats 
are in harbour, they like to rest on the top of the 
masts, especially if there is a gentle movement on 
the water to make them sway. 

One morning I saw five great seagulls on the 
mast-tops in the harbour. An elderly man, wearing 
a doggy old fur sea-cap of a type you rarely see 
nowadays except on whalers, was leaning over the 
wall and looking at them in a friendly way. Some 
one asked him if he knew any of these seagulls when 
they were fishermen. The old man made a sharp 
reply. He had not liked either the question or its 
levity. " The gulls are the fisherman's friend," he 
added. " Ye wad go away on and on and not see 
any fish, and then ye wad come on them on the 
water setting, and there would be fish in plenty after 
that. No fisherman would say a bad word about 
seagulls. They are the kindly yins — kindly birds." 
It was no use pressing him about the seagulls, nor on 
the other old superstitions about the boats putting back 
if any one on board mentioned the word " minister," 

or (for some reason) " Brounger," or "salmon" 

203 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

(although salmon may be spoken of as *' red fish "), 

but I noticed that neither he nor any of the other 

old men had left these beliefs so far behind as to 

make a joke of them. 

He was one of the last of the old Newhaven 

seamen. The sailing fleet itself is almost a thing of 

the past, and now musters, I think, but sixteen sail, 

seven or eight of which have a flag painted on the 

bow to show that they are pilot-boats. The pilots 

are men of the world, as a shark's tooth on their 

watch-chain, or some such foreign ornament will tell 

you, for the old regulation still holds good that 

they have to serve so many years in square rig — 

usually they are old Loch Line men — before they are 

qualified to apply for a pilot's certificate. The great 

majority of the Newhaven men are now on trawlers, 

but many have left the sea, and the electric cars that 

run along the main street snatch up the smartest of 

the younger generation and bear them ofl^ to the 

city to become good tradesmen and men of business. 

Once I was told by a Newhaven man, whose blood 

mounted to his face in the telling, that the Boxmaster 

204 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER 



ot the Ancient Society of Free Fishermen of Newhaven 
was a tailor. Every seaman of the old school is a 
bit of a tailor — probably a ninth 
part — and has none of the con- 
tempt that your literary landsmen, 
who have no knowledge of its art, 
profess for that trade ; but still, 
there you had it : the Boxmaster 
of the Ancient Society of F>ee 
Fishermen of Newhaven was a 
tailor ! 

Of the Society itself a good 
deal might be written, for the history 
and exclusiveness of this singular 
little community is bound up in it. 
Only sons of Free Fishermen can 
be admitted, and the entry money is still four pounds 
Scots (or six shillings and eightpence English). The 
Free Fishermen possess a silver cup with a ship 
engraved upon it, which was presented to them for 
acting as sea fencibles during the Napoleonic wars, and 

capturing the French frigate Tlieydc7i and taking her 

205 




DOOR-HEAD, NEWHAVEN 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

as a prize to Yarmouth roads. In 1796 the county 
of Midlothian presented them with a silver medal 
to commemorate their patriotic offer to fight the 
enemy in any vessel of war the Government might 
appoint. These and other relics are treasured at 
Newhaven. The Society's records go back to 1572, 
and some say that its history is very much older, 
but that is doubtful. James the Fourth founded 
Newhaven when he built a shipyard, harbour and 
ropery there in 1506. 

The new village must have been a centre of Scot- 
land's interest then, for the Great Michael {xh^ Great 
Eastern or the first Dreadnought of its day) was 
being built on the shore. Pitscottie says that all the 
oak in the county of Fife, save only Falkland's, was 
required for the work. There must have been great 
scenes here on placid days when the galleys came 
over the water from Fife towing the great logs. The 
King and his captains courageous — even Sir Andrew 
Wood and the Bartons — and his nobles, visited the 
work where the wrights and labourers were busy, 

while the country folk and Edinburgh citizens were 

206 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER 

perpetually coming and going, and perhaps the 
English ambassador may have been standing by with 
watchful curiosity. Pitscottie knew the dimensions 
of the Great Michael^ for the chief wright had planted 
them out in hawthorn in Tullibardine, as the Great 
Duke of Marlborough had the position of the Battle 
of Blenheim marked out with trees in the grounds 
of his Palace. Her length was 340 feet, her breadth 
amidships 56 feet to the water but only 36 feet 
within, as she was "armour-clad" in solid oak 10 
feet thick. She was armed with many heavy guns 
and 300 shot of small artillery — a terrible ship, the 
wonder of her age! She had " filcons, moyennes, 
quarter-falcons, slings, pestilent serpents and double- 
dags." We have many a big gun nowadays, but none 
so formidable in name as these. And, after all (to 
keep to the main business), if it comes to a matter 
of death, who would not rather be killed by a pes- 
tilent serpent or a double-dag than by a simple 
12-inch gun ? 

They were worthy of the great romantic king 

who built this ship, possibly as part of his scheme 

207 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

to take a Scottish fleet to the Mediterranean for his 
visit to Jerusalem. The Great Michael was built, 
equipped and sailed away, the king leaving her at the 
May, and that is almost all her history worth telling. 
She took part in the discreditable Carrickfergus ex- 
pedition, then sailed to France, and after Flodden was 
sold to the French Government and allowed to rot 
in the harbour of Brest. 

It would be interesting to trace a connection 
between the Great Michael of King James the 
Fourth and the Free Fishermen of Newhaven. 
King James brought shipwrights and artificers to 
Newhaven from many countries ; and if, as some 
authorities say, the costume of the women and 
some of their patronymics indicate a Dutch ancestry, 
it is one of the possibilities that the community may 
be descended from a band of shipwrights from 
Holland (then one of the great shipbuilding coun- 
tries of the world) who settled with their wives 
at Newhaven to work in the royal dockyard. The 
Society of Free Fishermen was founded at the end of 

the century in which the Great Michael was built. 

208 



AN HISTORICAL CHARACTER 

Be that as it may, it is at any rate sure that there 
are few places in Scotland to-day where the national 
traits are preserved with so racy and brave a flavour 
as in the village of Newhaven. 







jJ-JT-Vt-?^ 







EDINBURGH FROM INVERKEITHING 



■209 



2 D 



CHAPTER VIII 

A SATURDAY AFTERNOON 

Modern Edinburgh's recreation takes the forms that 
are common to all great centres, and it is difficult 
for the visitor to put his pen on any game peculiar 
to the city. That fine old characteristic sport, the 
bicker^ which once engaged the enthusiasm of all 
Edinburgh boys under eighteen years, perished with 
the coming of the policeman. For centuries it had 
been their popular idea of a pleasant Saturday after- 
noon. Heriot's boys would fight Watson's boys ; 
aristocratic George Square boys would fight the plebeian 
fry of the Potterrow \ sometimes the entire youth of 
the New Town would make a combined assault on 
the Old Town, and Borrow has told how the filthy 
alleys and closes of the High Street would disgorge 
swarms of bareheaded and barefooted callants, who, 
with gestures wild and " eldrich screech and hollo," 
would pour down the sides of the hill with stones 

2IO 



A SATURDAY AFTERNOON 

and slings and staves. Sometimes thousands took part 
in these engagements, Hmbs were broken, eyes were 
knocked out, and even death occurred. Yet the 










EDINBURGH FROM ARTHUR'S SEAT 



game was carried on without particular bitterness, and 
in the famous case, told by Scott, of the /^/ch^r in 
his youth, when one of the George Square boys cut 
down with his hanger the plebeian leader Green-Breeks, 
the latter declined either to give to the authorities 
the name of the lad who had wounded him, or to 



211 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

accept a fund which the aristocrats offered as " smart- 
money." " We did not become friends," said Scott, 
" for the bickers were more agreeable to both parties 
than any more pacific amusement ; but we conducted 
them ever after under mutual assurances of the greatest 
consideration for each other." 

So much for the bicker. Something of its fierce- 
ness, perhaps, lingers in the Rugby football matches 
by which the Edinburgh schools now settle their 
rivalries. Although the present form of the game 
is, of course, English, football is an ancient form of 
exercise with the Scots — and an ancient traditional 
form of the game in which hands, feet and head are 
used, and parish forms " scrums " against parish, is 
still played once a year in some Border towns. But 
Edinburgh football, Rugby and Association, is regu- 
lated by the usual modern codes. 

Golf has an ancient history in Edinburgh, as you 
are reminded by a seventeenth-century land in the 
Canongate called "Golfers' Land," which bears a 
crest of a dexter hand grasping a golf club, with the 
motto " Far and Sure." The tradition — which is 

212 



A SATURDAY AFTERNOON 

now, SO to speak, stymied by later evidence — is 
that one Paterson built the house with money 
won in a foursome match with the Duke of York 
(afterwards James the Seventh) as partner, against two 
Englishmen. There is no doubt, however, of Edin- 
burgh's long devotion to golf, and of the grip which 
that game (or occupation) has acquired over the lives 
of the citizens. Only in Edinburgh (and perhaps in 
St. Andrews) could you find a tombstone with the 
dead man's virtues summed up in the inscription, 

" He Drove a Long Ball." 

There is a story, that ought to be true, of such 

an inscription in an Edinburgh graveyard. One 

must needs drive a long ball nowadays to reach a 

place where there is no golf, and the visitor 

will see nothing typical of Edinburgh in the game 

except, perhaps, on the '' Lamiters' Course " on 

Bruntsficld Links, where you may see elderly men 

with one arm or a lame leg playing away gravely 

their round of thirty or forty holes — of course, very 

short holes. 

213 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Cricket, shinty, hockey and lawn-tennis are played 
here as elsewhere, and Powderhall is the centre of 
foot-racing in Scotland ; but for my Saturday after- 
noon I prefer to deal with a sport of which the 
ordinary citizen never hears, though its success there 
is one of the minor forms of fame that Edinburgh 
enjoys, and indeed many honest Yorkshire miners 
have never heard of this conspicuous city save in its 
relation to this sport. The sport is, of course, 
whippet-racing, which gains year by year in import- 
ance as the mining districts increase round the 
capital. To those who believe that Edinburgh's 
great development will come through the opening of 
mines and the production of cheap coal, causing the 
industries to come to the coal instead of the coal 
to the industries, the miners' sport of whippet-racing 
must seem in a sense Edinburgh's sport of the future. 

It is native to nearly all mining districts in the 
North, but Edinburgh is the centre of it in Scotland. 
Why there should be this marked preference among 
miners for dogs, why they should seek fellowship 

and sport from this delicate, dainty-legged, vivacious 

214 




THE CASTLE FROM THE VENN EL 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

variety, no one seems to know. Possibly their ex- 
ceedingly hard and grimy labours underground exhaust 
their interest in the achievements of other men, and 
they turn with particular satisfaction to the whim- 
sical life and sanguine temperament of a four-footed 
creature. It would be difficult to think of a type 
or of a mode of life more different from their own. 
The whippet is in general the least hardy of all 
dogs. It requires warmth, coddling, dainty food, 
and in its exercise its wishes must be consulted. 
The racing whippet has a neat little coat, he sleeps 
in the warmest room, often in the bed of the owner, 
and he sleeps as much as he likes. Usually he feeds 
better than his master's family — good stewed steak, 
brown bread, tripe and rabbit, are commonly his 
menu ; his susceptibility to draughts and cold is 
carefully considered. He does no work except the 
running, which he is, of course, eager to do. He 
has servants to wait on him in the form of his 
owner and his sons — if the latter are neither old 
enough nor rich enough to have a whippet of their 

own. He is shielded from all danger and insult. It 

216 



A SATURDAY AFTERNOON 

would seem as though the miner had decided that, if 
he himself could not lead what he conceived to be 
the ideal life, he would see to it that he owned a 
being who did. One is reminded of the Convict in 
Great Rxpcctatio7is^ and Little Pip, " his gentleman." 
The whippet himself is, to speak plainly, more 
a rough conception of a gentleman than the real 
thing. His pedigree is very mixed, and the Italian 
greyhound strain has had much crossing with dogs 
of lower breed. He has to get stamina, heart, and 
the competitor's instinct somehow, and he shows signs 
of various necessary mixed alliances when he takes 
the field. The terrier intrudes chiefly, but there are 
traits of almost any sort of dog you like to be seen 
among the whippets at a big contest. Then, he is 
not quite a sportsman, as the netted lines restraining 
each competitor to his own course in the heat tell 
only too plainly. Once past the tape, the four dogs 
who have lost, often make a combined assault on the 
winner, who then flees howling over the field. The 
whippet is, alas, deficient in self-control, and will not 
take his beatings like a Briton. Moreover, he yelps 

217 2 E 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

incessantly, and quite drowns the Georgian chant of 
the bookmakers. 

The big meets are at Powderhall, but those at 
Northfield — an enclosure somewhat shy of access near 
the Portobello Road — seemed to me more racy and 
characteristic of the ruder side of Edinburgh life. 
The spectacle I enjoyed one fine autumn day under 
a breezy sky might indeed have been a page from 
the notebook of old Walter Geikie, whose drawings 
(possibly to some degree because of his infirmities — 
he was deaf and dumb) have a single-minded ex- 
pressiveness and inner richness of characterisation that 
excels almost anything of the kind done since Hogarth's 
day. The five starters stand ready to slip the dogs. 
Each holds his dog with the left hand under the 
chest and the right firmly grasping the tail, by that 
means raising its hind-legs off the ground. The 
competing dogs yelp ; the other dogs, horribly excited, 
yelp in sympathy. Meantime the owner of each 
competing dog dances grotesquely in front of it 
whistling and crying, and swinging furiously a white 

rabbit skin, coloured cloth, or rubber ball, to which 

218 



A SATURDAY AFTERNOON 

he thus directs the dog's attention. This attained, 
the animated five retreat backwards, continuing their 
antics, and so till they reach the tape at the end 
of the 190 yards course. Behind the dogs stands 
an important man with a big pistol. The com- 
petitors yow-yow, the other dogs yelp loudly, the 
owners in the distance dance and yell and whistle ; 
the crowd roars, the bookmakers howl. Clearly, 
the time has come for the race to begin. The 
starters have the straining dogs pulled back, hind- 
legs high in the air. Bang ! 

Each launches his dog with a sort of throw, 
and without a protest off it flashes. Perhaps one 
of the dogs has no tail to speak of — probably a 
limitation imposed on it by a terrier sire. Off he 
goes with a quick shove like a dinghy off from a 
pier. Each dog is running for the rabbit skin, 
cloth or ball (technically " the rag ") by which he 
was trained. His instinct tells him he has to capture 
his own object, and he knows that none of the 
other dogs desire it, so it doesn't really matter how 

slowly he reaches it ; but he also knows — heaven 

219 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 



knows how ! — that he is there to run faster than the 
other dogs, and if he can't succeed he may be lucky 
enough to get a bite at the fastest. If he wins and 
gets his teeth in the rag, he holds on, and his master 
swings him round and round exultantly. If he 
cov.ers the 190 yards within the twelve seconds, he 
is not disgraced. Twenty such heats will be lost 
and won in an afternoon without dogs or men 
failing in heartiness and noise. It is an extraordi- 
nary and entertaining scene, in which a great deal 
of the rough native humour and peculiarities of 
Robert Fergusson's " Auld Reekie " still persists. 



220 



CHAPTER IX 

THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

An angel of God, they say, led St. Kentigern to 
a spot on the banks of the crystal Molendinar, 
and there he built a cell. Pilgrims visited him, 
and traders came to barter with the pilgrims ; then 
happened a remarkable series of miracles (commemo- 
rated to this day in the city arms), and so Glasgow 
began and flourished— a place of peace. In war it, 
of course, took some part. The sword of Wallace 
Wicht flashed in its streets, and Mary Qiieen of 
Scots, putting her kingdom to the touch, lost it all 
at Langside, which is now a southern suburb ; but 
from the twelfth to the fifteenth century it was 
ruled by bishops, and in the main its associations 
are of peaceful trading. 

Edinburgh from the beginning meant war. An 
almost inaccessible hill near the sea, it was a refuge 
for any tribe strong enough to oust those who held 

221 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

it, and so the hill ran red again and again through 
the ages, and, although symbols and weapons have 
changed, there have always been little armed men 
and banners on the top of the great beetling rock 
from before the time of Edwin until to-day. People 
gathered for protection within its gates ; the per- 
manent residence of a king made it the better worth 
attacking and defending. Houses arose in the shadow 
of the Castle, and the city grew with war ever in 
its nostrils ; looking southward for warning of an 
English advance over the Border, and northward for 
signs that the Forth had failed to bridle the wild 
Highlandmen. And so Edinburgh flourished, the 
centre of the nation's armed forces, the scene of 
terrible and heroic deeds, the whirlpool of inter- 
necine feud. As war died out in Scotland, her 
prestige seems to have declined, and that of Glasgow 
to have risen with the prevalence of peace. 

Reading the history of the two cities, one would 
expect to find that the people of each, if they still 
carried with them some impress of their past, would 
differ radically in type. The Old Edinburgh man 

222 





A 












-4 r:^ 






tt 










THE CASTLIi FROM TIIK (iKASSMARKET 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

would be watchful, reserved, and proud towards 
strangers, as men still are in countries where they 
carry arms ; slow to decide on a course of action, 
but quick to pursue it. A city of traders would 
be friendly and tolerant to strangers to create the 
right atmosphere for business ; they would be prompt 
in decision, with short memories for old wrongs 
and long pedigrees. And with this I must dismiss 
the people of " the uncrowned capital of Scotland 
in mufti." 

But in considering whether the citizens of 
Edinburgh retain to-day some of the traits of 
their ancestors, we must bear one thing in mind. 
No single factor did more to save the prestige of 
the capital after the Union than her retention of 
the seat of the judicature ; and as the law courts 
are the modern lists for the whole kingdom, a 
certain zeal for combat, that is characteristic of the 
city, survives among its inhabitants to-day. Farmer 
fighting against farmer, laird against laird, village 
against village, trader against trader, the battle has 

to be waged in the law courts by champions who 

224 




PARLIAMKM HOI .SK 
INTKRIOK 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

arc no longer knights-at-arms, but mercenaries, and 
who, if they are very famous champions, must be 
paid even before they flourish the least of their 
weapons. As in the days of " Cleanse the Causeway " 
and Border feuds settled by the sword, a very large 
part of Scotland's bad blood and violent passions 
is still centred in and about the High Street of 
Edinburgh. It is well that once a year ministers 
of the Gospel from all over the kingdom should 
flock to Edinburgh to hold their assemblies, exor- 
cising — as they colour the city a holy black — if 
only for the space of ten days, the contentious 
spirit of the place. 

As the colossal figure of Portsmouth is the 
seaman, so the lawyer bestrides Edinburgh, bringing 
his legal atmosphere and habit of mind into all 
departments of the city's life. It is not only that 
Senators of the College of Justice and Advocates and 
Writers to the Signet compose the large majority of 
the wealthier middle-class, and infect a wider circle 
of students, relatives, and friends, but there is also 
their nnny of clerks and dependents. Alexander 

225 2 V 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Smith talks of Edinburgh possessing a Valhalla of 
legal gods. " At Edinburgh," he says, " a Lord of 
Session is a Prince of the Blood, an advocate an 
heir to a peerage," and the taint of the " professional 
sectarianism " is over its society. Moreover, the 
professional men of law in Edinburgh are reinforced 
by a huge following of amateurs. As the seat of the 
Supreme Court, Edinburgh holds more jury trials, 
civil and criminal, than any other Scottish city ; more 
at one time, indeed, than the rest of Scotland. The 
abnormal stream of citizens thus diverted to the jury 
box, from time to time must have served, when it 
was released to ordinary channels of activity, to spread 
familiarity not merely with the leading lights of the 
Bar, but with the methods of legal argument and 
proof. Mr. Bartoline Saddletree still wags his head 
at many a close-mouth and tavern. It may even have 
helped, if help were needed, to teach the Edinburgh 
citizen that there are two sides to every question. 

The Courts themselves are an unfailing attraction. 
The contingent of enthusiastic idle amateurs that 

seldom deserts even the dullest hearing, attends in 

226 



--if 




;;^;ig^:J,i 




^^Ifeim 



VJr^i%)' 












EDINBURGH REVISITED 

force at the great forensic combats. Certainly the 
attitude of the Edinburgh man in the street is friendly 
to the lawyer, who figures so conspicuously in his 
city's life. I had a rather grotesque instance of this 
when I was looking for the early home of Robert 
Louis Stevenson in Heriot Row. I had asked a 
decent-looking workman for a direction, but he had 
never heard of Stevenson. But he must know, I 
urged— Stevenson, the great writer ; every one must 
have heard of him. " Oh, a writer ! " and his face 
cleared at once; *'well, this is the place for them. 
I'll just tak' ye doon to the Post Office and 
they'll tell ye there. If he's a writer he'll no 
be hard to fin'." He was interested in my 
search at once. For English readers it should be 
explained that what they would call a solicitor is in 
Scotland a writer. If one could roll together the 
parts that the law plays in the economy of Edinburgh 
and make a figure of them, it would be a more 
appalling spectacle than poor Peter Peebles with the 
papers of his ganging plea tied with a tarry rope. 

Once upon a time Scotland did behold in a 

228 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

material form the legal sufficiency of Edinburgh. 
This was in the first half of the nineteenth century, 
when Craig's plan of the New Town was clothed 
with stone and lime. Here was a great and con- 
scious effort of the spirit of the community to shatter 
its old scheme of things entire and build something 
nearer to its heart's desire. In the four great streets 
with attendant alleys and the six stately streets that 
intersect them, hardly a foot of space was left for 
workshop or factory ! In all those fine stone palaces, 
Edinburgh was quietly to settle down and live on 
the quarrels and minutes of agreement of Scotland. 
It would be curious to know what the reflective 
man of the time from Glasgow or Dundee or Paisley 
thought to himself as he looked around him. Possibly 
from musings upon these happy parallelograms, the 
well-known saying arose that not a big house is 
put up in Scotland but another house is put up in 
Edinburgh, signifying thereby that managing the 
estates and arranging the mortgages and lighting the 
boundary disputes of Scotland, would always provide 

an Edinburgh lawyer with a happy home. Not very 

229 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

long ago the Writers to the Signet managed all the 
great estates, and, without giving any guarantee for 
rents, earned a five per cent, commission by simply 
collecting them ; but in these days of falling revenues 
the lairds look more closely to their siller, and for 
the most part employ a local man to do this work 
at half that charge. But when Heriot Row was 
built, these £.vg: per cents, blushed and bloomed like 
a briar-rose at ilka door. 

How thoroughly the law has taken possession 
of the place is perhaps best seen when you con- 
sider the manners and customs of the Edinburgh 
man who would appear to be furthest from its 
influence. Among commercial people this city has 
the reputation of being most difficult to do business 
in, because of its love of holding repeated com- 
mittee and board meetings before anything can be 
settled, and, at the last issue, of saying that it will 
just put on its hat and go round and see its 
" man of business." To the commercial man from 
elsewhere this is the most humiliating touch of all. 

To find a merchant, who has won reputation and 

230 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

fortune as a builder or draper or grocer, not only 
consulting a lawyer on a point of equipment or 
organisation, but actually calling him " a man of 
business," has made some commercial visitors (like 







ARTHUR'S SEAT AND SALISBURY CRAGS FROM TlIK NOKTII BKIDCE 

Browning's Venetian when he thought of the " dear 

dead women with such hair, too ") feel " weary, 

and grown old." An agent for electric lifts, I 

have heard, was addressed by an Edinburgh merchant 

at the end of protracted negotiations in these 

231 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

words : " It's all right, of course, between you and 
me. You say you'll put right any breakdown through 
bad workmanship or bad material, but what I want 
to know is — what about my heirs ? " Never before 
in the whole course of his business had the agent for 
electric lifts ever heard that blessed word. But at 
this point one ought to remember, on the other 
hand, that the professional atmosphere of Edinburgh 
has advantages. '* There are only two places in 
Britain," an eminent architect from the west once 
remarked, " where they know how to treat an 
architect — London and Edinburgh. In Glasgow they 
treat you like a damned clerk of works." 

For centuries the law has attracted a large share 
of Scotland's best intellect to Edinburgh, and very 
naturally its chief by-product was letters, first in 
the department of criticism and later in fiction, 
these by-products making Auld Reekie a city of 
cities in the world. The critical attitude one might 
single out as the most deep-rooted characteristic of 
the inhabitants. In the early nineteenth century 

you have 'T/ie Kdtnburgh Review as dictator to 

232 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

English letters, and soon it found a worthy foeman 
in its neighbour Blackwood's Magaxine^ the journal of 
Lockhart and Wilson. These were in the days of 
Edinburgh's past, of which Alexander Smith thought 
he had heard too much, but in his own day he uttered 
the opinion of the city when he said that " the 
poet trembles before Edinburgh ; the success of an 
actor is insecure until thereunto Edinburgh has set 
her seal. Coarse London may roar with applause ; 
fastidious Edinburgh sniffs disdain and sneers reputa- 
tions away." You find reference to her pretensions 
in the memoirs of most of the Victorian celebrities. 
The hissing down of Thackeray in the Music Hall 
is sometimes mentioned as an instance of her arro- 
gance, but it was only an expression of national 
dislike towards an Englishman who had been nasty 
about Mary Qiiecn of Scots. Certainly, you still 
hear from actors, and especially from actresses, of 
their misgivings when they appear before an Edinburgh 
audience, and many lecturers say the same. There 
is a general agreement that it is the most difficult 



city to move \n tlic wliolc touruig system, [)er- 

233 2 G 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

mitting its judgment to control its emotions to a 
degree which, however creditable it may be to the 
intelligence of the audience, is often heart-breaking 
to the performers. 

It was a Glasgow man who recommended a 
tenth dram to a reluctant friend with the advice, 
*' Don't let your jud-judgment get the better o' ye." 
If Edinburgh people have a fault — and who after 
all has not ? — it is that they are apt to let their 
judgment get the better of them, to believe too 
exclusively that second thoughts are best. It is 
said that many budding projects, which in more 
kindly surroundings might have blossomed with 
honour to the city, were blighted by chill blasts of 
premature criticism. Edinburgh, they say, thinks 
too little of the Thing itself, too much of How it 
is Done. One remembers in this connection that 
Scotland's first Repertory Theatre was not started 
in Edinburgh but in the commercial capital. Of 
the recent examples of this flaw in her character, 
there is the long unequal fight between criticism 

and inspiration over the site of the Usher Hall, 

234 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

and the site of the Gladstone Monument, designed 
by Mr. Pittendrigh Macgillivray, is still unsettled. 
7'he one colossal instance of Edinburgh getting the 
better of its judgment is the fragment of the 
Parthenon on Calton Hill. 

But when one comes to the root of the matter, 
there is no want of evidence that the perfervid Scot, 
once his judgment is satisfied, exists just as plainly 
in Edinburgh as elsewhere. Dickens wrote that 
never had he witnessed such a scene of enthusiasm 
as when he read passages from David Copperjield 
there. '' Fifty frantic men got up in all parts of 
the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic 
men made speeches to the walls. I got the people 
to lie down on the platform, and it was like some 
impossible tableau in a gigantic picnic — one pretty 
girl in full dress lying on her side all night holding 
on to a leg of my table ! My people were torn to 
ribbons. They had not a hat among them, and 
scarcely a coat." Gladstone's Midlothian campaign 
is, of course, an historical example of Scots en- 
thusiasm. An English friend who recently contested 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

an Edinburgh election told me that his first meeting 
was very cold, and half-way through his second he 
was thinking about the best train to take him to 
London. His audience seemed to like him less 
than ever, and he felt things were hopeless, but 
before he finished a sudden change came about. 
The meeting warmly responded to all his points, 
and during the rest of his candidature the enthusiasm 
exceeded anything he had seen in Wales. The 
people had first to make up their minds about him, 
and when that was done they gave full play to the 
perfervid emotion of the North. 

The Edinburgh people are indeed the most re- 
sponsible of all God's creatures. In every depart- 
ment of the city's life you find the same system of 
deferred judgment, and striving for exactitude in 
statement. In a train or a tram-car you rarely 
hear an opinion expressed. A visitor interested in 
dialectics told me that the assistants in Edinburgh 
shops had a choice of words that he never heard in 
shops elsewhere. " I'll (or we'll) endeavour to " was, 

he thought, their most characteristic formula. Another 

236 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

noticeable point that I would trace more clearly to 
the a^gis of the law is the local custom of supporting 
a statement with a reason. Witness the girl behind 
a Princes Street counter who said : " It was freezing 
to-day — at least, it was freezing in Morningside, for I 
reside there, and saw frost on the window." Or the 
man on the top of a Portobello car, who cried to a 
lad whose hat had been blown off but who was slow 
to go after it : '' Aff ye get, man, aff an' efter it. 
Ye'll only lose a penny for your ride an' a hat costs 
sixpence." Yet another instance of the masterly 
summing up of a situation is the story of the newsboy 
who saw an extremely tall man emerge from a hotel 
at the west end of Princes Street and fall flat on 
the pavement. " That's it, mister," he cried ; " fa' 
again and ye're at the Register." 

Then, you can find the salient features of the city 
reproduced in that invaluable volume — The Rdinburgh 
Directory. Directories arc always a delightful study 
for those interested in the characteristics of com- 
munities, but rarely do you find your search so well 
repaid as in this compilation. The differentiating 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

genius of the place (it flowers in every line of 
Stevenson) touches the whole work with her delicate 
hand. Where, for instance, but in Edinburgh could 
you find the profession of Artist classified under 
all its various sections? ^^ Artists — See also Painters 
(animal, historical, landscape, miniature, portrait) and 
Photographers ; " and, sure enough, there they are, 
each in his proper place. With an eternal verity like 
Art treated so extensively, it is right that an interest 
so temporary as news should be limited to one News 
Agency and another dealing with Golf. " Bagpipe 
Makers — See Musical Instrument Makers" is at once 
accurate and a neat defiance of the Sassenach. Many 
other significant things might be plucked from this tree 
of knowledge, but I will content myself with remarking 
on the large number of Border and Fife names and 
(when all things are considered) the smallness of the 
Highland settlement, although Edinburgh, moreover, 
supports three sporran-makers. 

The Directory helpfully reminds me that the Law 
is not the only great activity in Edinburgh. Litigation 

and education have been classed together as the two 

238 



THF, MODERN ATHF.XIAX 

chicl local iiuliistrics, llic Ro\al 1 ligh School is 
famous as the school ol Sir Walter Scott, ol fxing 
Edward tlic Sc\cnth, aiul ol niaiu' another ianK)ii> man. 
It is now under the nianaiiement ol the School Board. 
and its existence, it less conspicuous, is still none the 
less u-elul. I he Edinburgh Academy provides the 
shortest wav to the Scottish Bar. George Watson's 
College is understood to lead to distinction in e\'ery 
part of the world, hut more especialK in South 
.America, where, it is said, vou will always find the 
man on the top to be either a Buenos Ayrean or a 
Watsonian. 1 leriot's I fospital, once a hoarding-school, 
now a day-school ol a verv [)ractical sort, was fountled 
hv " jingling (ieordie," ]ames the Si.xth's jeweller and 
gossip. I'ettes, f,oretto, and Merchiston are modelled 
on the English public school system. A great [)art of 
I'.dinburgh's prestige in education coiik-n Irom the 
efforts of the .Merchant C^ompanv, which for forty 
years has devoted the largest part of its immense 
revenue to the c-ndo\^-mc-nt and mamtenance ol (i\e 
day-schools lor hoys and crirls. I' (Imburijh Umversity 
is a worth\ c ro\v n to the c-diuational system of (he- 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

city, and although the foundation of provincial 
universities in England, the Rhodes Scholarships, the 
increasing trend of Edinburgh youths towards Eng- 
lish universities, and an over-deliberation in adapting 
itself to the circumstances of a new age, give its 
friends some apprehension, it still holds its supremacy 
in medicine and is one of the great universities of 
the world. Woman was welcomed here when Eng- 
land had all its university doors barred and bolted 
against her. 

Banking, insurance, accounting, and printing have 
their stately headquarters here, and even to con- 
template the vast salaries paid to the managers is 
said to make the observers giddy. Distilling, brew- 
ing, motor-car and meter manufacture are other 
industries that bring riches to Edinburgh. Although 
the number of very rich men is much smaller than 
in Glasgow or Manchester and some other cities, it 
is probably the wealthiest in the kingdom in pro- 
portion to inhabitants. 1 have been told on semi- 
official authority that the income-tax returns for the 

west central part of Edinburgh are only exceeded 

240 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

in the London district that includes Mayfair. The 

rental returns show Edinburgh to be on the whole 

the most luxuriously housed large town in Britain. 

This is mainly due to the fact that Edinburgh men of 

all degrees live in their city. An unusual number own 

their houses, and it is said that more " Form IV. 's " 

for the Land Tax were sent to Edinburgh than to any 

other city except London. " Pride and Poverty " 

was the traditional sneer at Edinburgh, but it dates 

from the days when it applied to all Scotland. I 

have been told that the deposits of the Edinburgh 

Savings Bank— apart from all deposits in other banks 

— would show an average of forty pounds for every 

inhabitant. Moreover, it contains per acre and per 

mile more baronets, K.C.B.'s, knights, and people in 

Who's Who than any other city outside Westminster. 

It is itself, indeed, the Westminster of Scotland. 

For a visitor — or a re-visitor — to deal summarily 

with church questions and church-going in Edinburgh 

would, of course, be an impertinence. All one might 

say is that it contains about two hundred churches, 

or one church to every 1600 inhabitants. Some 

241 2 H 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Strangers profess to find that the most impressive 
thing in Edinburgh is the three noble columns of 
church advertisements in The Scotsman of a Saturday. 
Established Church, United Free, Roman Catholic, 
English, Unitarian, Trinitarian — they all advertise, 
and flippant Englishmen, comparing these three with 
the meagre column in which theatres and concerts 
are announced, think that they have found Edin- 
burgh's real idea of entertainment. 

Another point where the English visitor suddenly 
finds that he is in a foreign country, and has reached 
a storm-point in the city, is when he hears the word 
" prelacy " hissed forth with the utmost passion by 
persons of a quiet, self-contained exterior. At the 
Established Church Assembly Hall he may see such an 
incident as a little group of respectable, elderly men 
and women breaking into cries of furious reproach 
and objurgation as certain ministers are unobtrusively 
attempting to leave the precincts of the hall. "Judas ! 
you would sell your church for a crucifix ! Serve 
the Church o' England or the Church o' Rome if 

you like, but don't take the Kirk o' Scotland's 

242 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

money ! " They would continue the cry, a little 
self-consciously, until the minister was out of ear- 
shot ; then they consult together and — go away for 
a cup of tea. A year ago two strangers, pausing to 
admire the steeple of St. Andrew's Church in George 
Street, were accosted by a man, who crossed the street 
to meet them. With the preface that he presumed 
he was speaking to Englishmen, he said, *' Living 
as you do under a benighted system of prelacy and 
patronage, you should be interested to hear that four 
hundred noble ministers walked out of that church 
into the street to protest against the system of pat- 
ronage. That was called the Disruption. Good day, 
sirs." With a civil inclination of the head he went 
his way, leaving his listeners with something worth 
thinking about. Certainly no Scot (as one of them 
was) can remember without pride how those single- 
minded men abandoned manses and stipends and 
went out to start the world afresh for a point of 
principle. Eager crowds waited in the streets while 
the momentous meeting was being held, and when 

the head of the j)rocession emerged there were cries 

^43 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

of " They're out ! " and messengers ran off all over 
the city. This was the beginning of the Free Church, 
now joined to the United Presbyterians under the title 
of the United Free Church of Scotland. The event 
happened in 1843. 

The little explosions against prelacy that he may 
hear in the course of his wandering, will not appear 
strange to the Southron who has visited Greyfriars 
Churchyard and seen its monuments and heard the 
stories of the prosecutions which took place there 
and in the Grassmarket, when Charles the Second 
was king. On a flat stone in the graveyard thousands 
signed the National Covenant, some with blood for 
lack of ink. In many of the graveyards throughout 
Scotland you may yet find such epitaphs as that on 
a tombstone in Hamilton, quoted by Stevenson : — 

"Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads: 
In Edinburgh lie our bodies ; here our heads ; 
Our right hands stand at Lanark ; these we want 
Because with them we signed the Covenant." 

There have been many religious persecutions in 

Scotland, and the Covenanters did not stay their 

244 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

hand when their turn came, but the skying and 
tortures during the Episcopacy in Scotland have left 
the deepest stamp on the popular memory, even to 
this day. A few years ago an old ballad shop in 
the Canongate had many such pamphlets, as " An 
Elegy in Memory of that Valiant Champion, Grier- 
soN, late Laird of Lag, who died December 23, 
1733, wherein the Prince of Darkness commends 
many of his Friends who were the chief Managers 
of the late Persecution." Pamphlets of this kind can 
still be found in several obscure parts of the town. 
But even in Edinburgh the Covenanters and their 
wrongs are a half-forgotten memory, fading out of 
fireside story into the cold perspective of history. 
Yet no sketch of the Edinburgh man can approach 
completeness without the dark background of the 
early days of the Kirk. 

Still the gibe about Edinburgh's pride and poverty 
does persist, and if you look closely into the matter 
you find that it has a basis and by no means a 
regrettable one. Appearance clearly means a good 

deal in Edinburgh. It has been said that there 

245 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

appearance, not time, is money. If Mr. Bradley had 
lived in Edinburgh he would never have written his 
monumental inquiry into Appearance and Reality, 
for there he would have learnt that Appearance is 
Reality. The characteristic does not seem to have 
an historical basis, for we see that James the Sixth, 
when he was bringing his Danish bride to his capital, 
wrote in some trepidation to the Provost : " For God's 
sake see all things are richt at our hame-coming. A 
King with a new-married wife does not come hame 
ilka day." On the same momentous occasion he 
borrowed a pair of silk stockings from the Earl of 
Mar with the plea that " ye wadna wish that your 
King suld appear a scrub on sic an occasion." 
Edinburgh seems to have disdained appearances so 
far as to have become a by-word for unsavouriness 
throughout the United Kingdom until the time of 
the Great Flitting. When the grimy, smelly Old 
Town was exchanged for the breezy glories of the 
New, another era began, and it is natural to suppose 
that the people sought for an outward expression of 

their prestige in their clothes and manners as well 

246 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

as in their buildings. Certainly no other community 
considered itself so carefully as to have issued such 
a public placard as Carlyle noticed on the famous 
occasion of George the Fourth's visit ; that '' it was 
expected that everybody would be carefully well 
dressed, black-coat and white duck trousers if at all 
convenient." Carlyle — stern soul ! — decided that if 
he changed his dress at all, he would wear a white 
coat and black trousers. 

The national monument on Calton Hill was started 
with grand ceremony, but the money was all exhausted 
after the twelve columns and entablature were com- 
pleted, the demands for Edinburgh's other vast 
building schemes drying up the sources of further 
contribution. At this point the " pride and poverty " 
taint, formerly applied to Scotland as a whole, was 
fastened upon Edinburgh, which to its eternal credit 
refused to take advice and pull down the fragment, 
and so to-day it stands out before the eyes of the 
world as the memorial of an age whose very mistakes 
were heroic. Even those who know nothing of the 

mighty spirit that was stirring in the city at that 

247 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

time are moved by the great ruin on Calton Hill 
and the lofty Dean Bridge, to wonder what manner 
of men these Edinburgh people were. Desiring an 
impressive ruin (it would seem), they did not wait 
for Time's help, but promptly built one for them- 
selves ; desiring an impressive bridge, they did not wait 
for a great river, but built over the inconsiderable 
stream they had at hand. Small wonder that they 
are proud, and that clerks swing canes in business 
hours, and that men in the post office wear camellias 
in their button-holes, and that a gun goes off at 
one o'clock, so that they can all pull out their 
watches and do credit to one another. People must 
dress carefully when they are to walk in the full 
sunshine of Princes Street, and cultivate dignity 
in front of a romantic castle and Grecian-Doric 
buildings. 

Nevertheless it is a little difficult for strangers 
from less-favoured places to fall at once into line 
with a city where circumspection sometimes carries 
with it censoriousness, and where a person whose 

standards are different has either to make the effort 

248 



c i 

I. 



}r ) 



•{..f> ] 



V 



)'\ 



r^ 




THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

and cultivate those of Edinburgh, or to remain always 
an alien. I know of one man who was brought to 
the conclusion that the way was too steep for him, 
although he was the hardy climber who lit the 
lamps on Calton Hill. It was many years ago. 
His gloaming march up the steep empty stairs in the 
rock, lighting with his long, brass-ended torch the 
iron lamps up against the sky, then higher still 
over the brow of the rock to the one near the 
Old Observatory, used to fascinate me, night after 
night. He seemed to be lighter not of lamps 
but of stars. However, he was a decent North 
of England man, a little soured by his failure to 
get on terms with the people whose hills he lit. 
He had been a worker in the mills, but his health 
suffering, he had come north and sought an out-of- 
door life. He had gone first to Glasgow, of which 
city he had nothing but good to say. *' Quiet, 
friendly, 'omely people. They would 'elp you if you 
was in trooble, though you was only a straenger. 
They wouldn't call naemes after you — not in Glasgow, 

they wouldn't. Though you was altogether a straenger, 

249 2 I 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

they would take up with you. It was joost like 
Wigan, where I coom from. Ae, we used to go friendly 
together, aal the lamplighters, to the funeral of a 
lamplighter when he died, though we 'ad 'ad no 
knowledge of 'im. It's not a very 'ealthy plaes 
is Glasgow, I think, and there was a lot of lamp- 
lighters, and I used to spend most of my Saturdays 
going to funerals there. It was very friendly like : 
an 'omely, friendly plaes was Glasgow. But Edinburgh 
— although they're good to you here in your busi- 
ness — it's not a nice 'omely plaes to live in. They're 
bad and quarrelsome — always something. Me and my 
wife are quiet-living and always paed our way. But 
it's names called after you on the stairs and shouting 
after you and putting it on you as you'd done some- 
thing you 'adn't done, and ill-feeling general, and 
everybody seems to be straengers here. It's the one 
being better than the other, and having a grander 
'ouse than the other and general puttin' on. My 
wife says it's aal red 'errings and pianofortes in 
Edinburgh." 

Now the lamplighter's story has some significance, 

250 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

not only because of his ideas about Edinburgh, but, 
as I subsequently found, because of Edinburgh's ideas 
about his story. It became a sort of test question 
in different Edinburgh circles. Some sympathised 
with his complaint, seeing in it a proper protest 
against the modern upsetting ways of people aping 
their betters and trying to appear different from what 
they were. On the other hand, a large class saw in 
the " red herrings and pianofortes " the pursuit of an 
ideal at considerable self-sacrifice. It was, in brief, 
the spirit that had made Scotland what she was. 
" Red herrings and pianofortes" was only a restatement 
of the motto, " Cultivate learning on a little oatmeal." 
William Sharp quotes as an old saying that the 
Edinburgh folk are all born with a bit of North 
Sea ice in their veins and a touch of grey east 
wind in their minds. The visitor can say little 
about that ; only a young native or an old resident 
can generalise soundly about three hundred and twenty 
thousand persons. One hears that the divisions and 
cross-divisions in Edinburgh society are more diffi- 
cult to follow than elsewhere, which seems natural 

251 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

in a city where the professional element predominates 
and where people see one another every other day. 
Outside of London, Edinburgh alone of British 
cities possesses a Smart Set that is identified as such 
even by so severe an estimator of social altitude as 
" A Foreign Resident." But all that a humdrum 
visitor dares say is that a reputation for exclusive- 
ness has long been attached to Edinburgh, and that 
an outward expression of it at once meets the eye 
in the streets. Much of the outer ring of the city 
is composed of neat middle-class houses of two 
storeys with a short garden in front, and outside the 
garden gate is a bell. The visitor may not approach 
nearer than the gate. He rings the bell. The 
household can then scrutinise him, and, if it likes 
his looks, can set some mechanism in motion by 
which the gate quietly opens, and he may then enter 
the citadel. The house with the bell at its garden 
gate may be likened unto Edinburgh. 

The main business of the Modern Spirit seems 
to be to destroy the characteristic and the picturesque 

in people as in their costumes and to make every one 

252 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

grotesquely alike. Even in Edinburgh, which seems 
designed by Providence to produce a race with 
marked distinctions in harmony with the place, 
personal characteristics are becoming less and less 
apparent, and some day the observer will not be able 
to find any. Let me hasten to note a few that 
may still be discovered. 

The stranger at once notices that much attention 
is paid to gait and carriage here, and that saluta- 
tions have a certain practised grace not common 
nowadays. That seems a natural result of the spacious 
uncrowded streets where people have time to prepare 
themselves for a meeting and to decide the exact 
degree of their gesture and expression. But it is 
much more puzzling for the stranger to understand 
why so many elderly Edinburgh men should look 
like Michael Angelo. '' Michael of the Terrible 
Brows " acquired them, it is said, by much brooding 
over death and judgment, and some have thought 
that the set frowning look on the faces of so many 
Edinburgh men who have passed middle age is due 

to the influence of the Edinburgh Sundays and much 

253 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

meditation among the tombs. It is, however, nothing 
of the kind, but simply the seal of years of effort 
to keep on a tall hat in a strong wind in these 
high-set streets. Probably generations subjected to 
the same unequal struggle predispose the Edinburgh 
man easily to acquire this impressive physical charac- 
teristic, but that is a question for the eugenist. I 
have heard it said that you can tell an elderly 
Edinburgh gentleman in the dark by feeling the 
frontal development of his head — a test seldom applied, 
however, without a formal introduction. A delightful 
and very common experience of the visitor is to 
see the immediate relaxation of these severe visages 
in hearty social life. 

In the wind-searched streets of the city one 
might also find some explanation for the neatness 
and skilfulness of dress noticeable everywhere among 
Edinburgh women. Here, I suppose, as in London 
and elsewhere, there must be some women with a 
love for trashy finery, but somehow one never sees 
them. If the high winds do not teach them the 

value of reefed canvas, the pressure of public opinion 

254 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

must do SO. " Entablature " has been used as a 
handy phrase for hat, headgear, and neckwear, and 
if one might use " pHnth " for skirts and footgear, 
one would say that the neatness of plinth of the 
Edinburgh women has struck many observers as a 
feature of these streets. 

From characteristics that may be traced to the 
physical conditions of the city one may turn to 
those which may have their origin in its history and 
find many tempting points for digression. One would 
like to consider, for instance, how far the peculiar 
system of life in high lands of the Old Town affected 
the gentry who dwelt there in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. It is a subject for a book rather 
than a side-note, and quite worthy of the copious 
research and learning, of which modern Edinburgh 
has so large a store to bring to bear upon it, but 
even the amateur in Old Edinburgh writings speedily 
becomes aware that social conditions of an extra- 
ordinary kind existed for generations and had definite 
effects on the people. Inventories after fires and 

other evidence show that at the time of the Union 

255 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

there existed lands of eleven and twelve storeys, of 
which the lower two were tenanted by a deposit of 
sedan-chairmen and kailwives, and the others con- 
tained strata, which increased in richness, as it were, 
from lawyers' clerks, merchants, town councillors, and 
Writers to the Signet, to country lairds, persons of 
title and dowager ladies ; above these lawyers again, 
and dancing masters and craftsmen with an outcrop 
of poor in the attics. The houses in these lands 
were so small that even earls had sometimes to do 
with one or two servants at the most, and in the 
best families the linen was washed at home, the finer 
things being hung in the passages and living rooms 
and the coarser things hung on the pulley-hees^ 
just as the poor folk hang their rags there to-day. 
Important personages had to fumble up and down 
those dark stairs and touch shoulders with their 
rougher neighbours from above and below. Each 
stair was like the main street of a village where the 
news and gossip passed up and down directly and 
through servants. A birth, a death, conjugal cor- 
rection, social misbehaviour, bad luck and good luck 

256 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

would be common knowledge. The people, gentle 
and simple, must have lived for at least a couple of 
centuries in what would seem to us now an appalling 
state of intimacy. Think of the knowledge of life 
this must have meant to the girls of family brought 
up in Old Edinburgh. Theirs must have been a 
world apart from the upper-class English life of 
the period with its seclusion and silence of town 
mansion. 

One cannot help thinking that the plainly-marked 
difference in the expression and mien of women in 
Raeburn's portraits, when compared with those in the 
portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney, 
was not entirely due to the difference of temperament 
between the Scotsman and the Englishmen. It is 
probable that people who knew so much about life as 
those bred in or influenced by the Old Edinburgh 
tradition could never have given themselves up to the 
gestures and expressions of allurement and languishing 
of the English masters. In the faces of nearly all 
Raeburn's women there is something direct and — 
but disillusioned is not the word, for the faces have 

257 2 K 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

zest and brightness. Even the youngest have the 
look of women who believe only part of what they 
hear, and who know much more about themselves 
and other people than they would care to tell. But 
if these straight - glancing ladies hint that life had 
lost something of its bloom, they also often suggest 
a rich humour and humanity, as if they liked the 
taste of actuality and their minds had thrived 
upon it. 

Scott, Cockburn, and other writers, in whose youth 
the Old Tradition of dwelling in the land was coming 
to an end, have left famous pictures of a wonderful 
type of Old Edinburgh gentlewoman which was 
plentiful then. Bluntly outspoken, even a little 
Rabelaisian in their speech flavoured with racy natural 
images, they are good-humoured and strong-headed, 
able to exchange badinage with a kailwife or to hold 
their own with dignity in any company however 
learned or grand. These surely are the combination 
of qualities one might expect to find as the gift of 
life in the closes. The cramped flats and the custom 

of the town meant few servants, and the upper classes 

258 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

had to assert themselves by what natural dignity they 
had. Wilson, speaking of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe 
as showing to the nineteenth century the type of a 
gentleman of the Old Edinburgh tradition, singles 
out his peculiar variations of intimacy and haughtiness. 
Half a century has gone since the last of the generation 
of gentlefolk born in Old Edinburgh passed away, 
but it is difficult to believe that anything so strongly 
marked and germane to the capital of Scotland 
should have gone without leaving a trace on the 
life of the city. 

Another channel for speculation is what memen- 
toes of the old intellectual prestige of Edinburgh 
still remain, and as the sort of minor index that 
comes to the notice of a visitor, he cannot help 
seeing that people are often better known by their 
intellectual hobby than for their official position or 
prominence in business. Many instances of this 
might be quoted. In one the stranger made an 
inquiry in general company about a Government 
official of some distinction whom he had recently 

met. Nobody seemed to know him, until some one 

259 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

said, "Oh, of course, that's " mentioning the 

department of Utopian coin on which he was the 
greatest living authority. A merchant, the ramifica- 
tions of whose business are not contained by Scotland, 
was identified as the first living authority on the 
Great Roc's eggs ; and a successful lawyer was 
known to every one as possessing the greatest col- 
lection of mediaeval cannon-balls in Britain. Of 
course, even in Edinburgh, every one is not the 
greatest living authority on something, but there are 
enough of such personages to suggest that learning, 
pursued for its own sake, still gives a mental salt 
to its society. Moreover, you will hear more Latin 
tags in ordinary conversation than anywhere in 
Britain, save in Oxford, but it is law Latin. Still, 
it was a retired army major who in 19 lo wrote a 
letter to the Scotsjnan about the paving of Princes 
Street which consisted of ^m^ lines, four of them in 
Latin. One has heard it often said that, although 
Edinburgh may maintain something of its old level 

of culture, it does not nowadays draw the eyes of 

260 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

the world. The cautious observer, however, will not 
assume too much from that. The eyes of the world 
are apt to be a little slow and weary. It is only 
within these last few years, for instance, that the 
rarer genius of Scottish art is coming into its own. 
Orchardson and Pettie, by their long residence in 
the South and their romantic subject-matter, received 
their full meed of honour — the latter perhaps more 
than his share — but William M'Taggart, whose works 
are the most spiritual and original expression of 
Scotland through painting, and David Scott, her one 
big imaginative artist, are yet hardly known to the 
outside world. Even Raeburn's fame south of the 
Tweed is hardly a generation old. In Redgrave's 
Dictio7iary of Artists he is mentioned only as one of 
the followers of Lawrence ! 

Alexander Smith in his day spoke of Edinburgh 
as the " place of Yesterday," yet as we look back 
through the perspective of time we see that niany 
striking figures were even then at his elbow, and 

the next generation was to bring Stevenson, who made 

261 



EDINBURGH REVISITED 

Edinburgh shine with a new warmth in the minds 
of men. Who can say how many of the heroes of 
the future are massed around as one walks in Princes 
Street ? Who, indeed ? Not mine, at any rate, to 
repeat the old refrain — . 

" London and Death gar thee look droll 
And hang thy heid." 

One may say, however, that Edinburgh feels the 
attraction of London more potently than other cities, 
as it is in one way the most Anglicised of Scots 
communities, and that, owing to one development of 
its educational system and perhaps to the proximity 
of the sea, it loses more than its share of its best 
youth. As I have said in the beginning of these 
notes, Edinburgh is a city from which you look 
down on lighthouses and out on bare green hills ; 
and the sea and the hills must predispose a part of 
the great army of youth that gathers in the city to 
thoughts of travel and the world elsewhere. Wherever 
you turn in Edinburgh, you face distant prospects 

on sea and land. Standing on Calton Hill on a 

262 



THE MODERN ATHENIAN 

clear day, looking out to the ocean and back to the 
hillsj you remember with peculiar appropriateness the 
words of Stevenson's requiem — 

" Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill." 

One can imagine the exile as he wrote it recalling 
images first conceived on this spot ; and the spectacle 
is there to-day to stir the minds of new generations 
and send them forth on their travels. 

I will close with a figure of tragedy — the figure 
of one such returned wanderer back from the fight, 
with prosperity to cheer him, who sits in a club 
window looking out on Princes Street, wondering 
why Edinburgh isn't more like Buenos Ayres. 



Printed by Bai.lantvne, Hanson &• Co. 
n^dinburgb 6* London 








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